Chapter Sixteen
TWO DAYS AFTER MARK arrived in Bristol, his brother suggested a walking trip.
“My duties are reduced during the summers,” Smite said. “And Ghost could use some country air.” He’d said this with a gesture at the puppy, who gamboled about their feet.
Mark had translated this as: Stop moping about.
They’d sent a letter to Ash, informing him that they’d be gone a few days—eldest brothers did tend to worry, even over grown men—and Mark spent the remainder of that day losing himself in procuring supplies and planning the trip. He’d pored over maps and railway timetables, finally deciding to take the train to Reading, and from there, a meandering journey through country roads until they reached Basingstoke. It would be four or five days through tracks and lanes. Mark made note of a few smaller hostelries along the road where they might stay.
“None of the big ones now,” Smite had said lazily. “I don’t know how they’ll take to a dog.”
They’d have taken an entire menagerie from a duke’s brothers. But then, Mark didn’t need Smite to explain his peculiarities.
It was good to have something else to think of. It was better still when they disembarked from the passenger car in Reading to a bright, sunny day. It was a day so glorious that Mark could almost forget that everything else in his life was far from perfect.
The locomotive pulled away from the station in a cloud of smoke, leaving Mark and his brother pushed about on all sides by the crowd leaving the platform.
Smite met Mark’s eyes and jerked his head toward the road. In this dry weather, the track was dusty with all the passing traffic. His brother would naturally prefer to choke on road-dust than spend time in a crowd. Mark shouldered his burden, happy to bear a little discomfort. It would get his mind off the interminable spiraling back, the uncomfortable thoughts of her…
No need to speak, thankfully. They made their way out and started through the clouds of hanging dust, holding their breaths. The fields weren’t far beyond; once there, they might not need to speak to anyone until they reached their destination for the evening.
The whole notion sounded lovely.
“Oy!” A voice sounded behind them, recognizable and yet impossible at the same time.
Smite paused, turning on the shoulder of the road. A man—tall, burly—was striding toward them. He moved quickly, without once seeming to hurry. He had a satchel thrown over his shoulder; he barely glanced down the road for traffic before darting across.
“I had thought,” the man said without any additional greeting, “the two of you would be civilized enough to stop in the public house before sallying forth.”
“That’s where you went wrong,” Smite said. “We didn’t intend to do anything so dramatic as sally. We had just planned to start.”
Mark stared at the newcomer in dumb confusion. “Ash,” he finally said stupidly. “What are you doing here?”
“Got Smite’s message about the trip late last night,” his eldest brother replied. “I can’t have the two of you haring off on your own, can I?”
“We don’t hare, either. We walk. With dignity.”
Beside them, Ghost gave the lie to that by jumping up on Ash, his paws leaving two dusty footprints on his trousers.
Ash was protective, sometimes to an overbearing degree. Mark should have realized how suspicious it was that he’d not responded to their letter with a lecture on walking safely. In his normal course of events, he would have offered them an armed guard…or…or whatever other ridiculous thing he might have dreamed up.
He must have spent the entirety of the morning riding here. All that, just to meet them for an hour?
His eldest brother showed no sign of fatigue, however. Instead, he simply shifted the satchel he carried.
“Well.” Smite spoke first. “I suppose we could set aside our haring and sallying long enough for a brief repast.”
“Not at all. There’s no need to make the slightest alteration in your plans on my account.” Ash grinned. “I can keep up with the lot of you.”
Smite glanced at Mark, his eyes widening. That slight entreaty was as good as a plea on bended knee for him.
“Keep up?”
“I’m coming with you,” Ash said. His jaw set as he spoke, and he looked away from them. “Unless—”
“Can you neglect your business affairs so long?” Mark asked.
“Can you neglect your wife so long?” Smite asked, perhaps a little more slyly.
Ash let out a sigh. “Margaret suggested, in very strong terms, that I should come along.”
Mark exchanged another glance with Smite. Ash and Margaret had been happily married for five years; Mark couldn’t imagine Margaret sending him away.
He was trying to work out a way to politely ask what might have happened, when Smite broke in, no politeness at all. “Good Lord, Ash, what did you do?”
“Nothing!” Ash said. “Or—at least—nothing I shouldn’t be doing.”
The track across the field, this close to town, was wide enough that they could all three walk abreast, and so they started down the path.
“Nothing?”
“If you must know,” Ash said in patronizing tones, “she is increasing.”
“Oh, congratulations!” Mark clapped his brother on the back.
Smite shook his hand, and Ash’s smile broadened, as if he’d done something very clever.
“But now I’m doubly astonished,” Mark continued. “I wouldn’t have thought you could be pried from her side under those circumstances, not with a full harness of oxen.”
His eldest brother stiffened. “She says,” Ash muttered, “that I hover.”
Mark stifled a laugh, just as Smite hid his face.
“I don’t hover,” Ash said. “Do I hover?”
“Surely not!” Mark said, overly polite.
Smite grinned. “Never.”
“I couldn’t imagine such a thing.”
“Never in a million years.”
“Hovering,” Mark said, “puts me in mind of a butterfly—a light creature, flitting about from flower to flower, delicate as you please, vanishing at the first sudden movement.”
“And that,” Smite said, completing Mark’s thought, “seems rather too circumspect for you. My guess is that you were circling overhead, like some kind of obscene vulture.”
“Waiting to pounce on any weakness.”
Ash put on hands on a hip. “You unholy pack of ruffians,” he said in amusement. “I do not—”
“Only to give aid, of course,” Mark said. “You are perhaps the most benevolent vulture I have ever met.”
Smite sniggered. “Albeit not the most polite.”
“You two are the most captious lot of ingrates ever to walk the face of Britain.” Even though Ash’s words were harsh, his tone was playful. And for the first time since Jessica had rejected his proposal, Mark realized that he was smiling. The future no longer seemed quite so bleak and barren. His brothers were together; and whatever waited could not be so impossible. “In all seriousness.” Ash took a deep breath. “Will I be in the way?”
It wasn’t Mark’s place to answer that question. He looked to Smite, who looked away.
He’d told Jessica that it was hard for Smite to make friends. That wasn’t even the half of it. Smite didn’t keep overnight servants. He wouldn’t stay at a hotel where they might be bothered in the evening. He wouldn’t even stay in Ash’s townhouse in London; he had a flat he kept there for precisely that purpose. There were maybe three people in the world who understood why. Ash wasn’t one of them.
Smite’s lips thinned. He took a deep breath. “Don’t worry, Ash,” he said. “We’re an unholy pack of ruffians here. You should fit right in.”
A walking trip. Nothing to do but move and talk with his brothers. He’d not have to see a thing that reminded him of Jessica for close to a week. Mark smiled. Why, by the time he got back to London, he would have forgotten Jessica entirely.
Jessica could read the words from across the square. The post-boy was already mobbed by a crowd, eager to fork over their coins for this news—and this was only the first issue to be printed. In a week or two, she would be able to collect the remainder of her earnings from Nigel Parret, and she could leave London. What she would do thereafter, she didn’t yet know.
But she had one last piece of business to conduct. She ducked into the taproom where she’d seen Sir Mark for the first time. She had put off this interview as long as she could. She needed to tell George Weston what she should have told him months ago. She needed to tell him to go to the devil.
He was waiting for her at a table in the back. He wasn’t unpleasant to look at—brown hair, brown eyes and an indistinct nose. Still, as she smoothed her skirts away and sat down before him, her teeth gritted. Every inch of her skin remembered what he’d done, recalled it in a visceral way that she could not forget. She felt faintly nauseous. The very air around him felt like a punch to the stomach.
Not that he had ever hit her. If anyone had asked, she wouldn’t have said that he was a bad man. He went to church service regularly. Back when he’d been her protector, he’d even been…well, she couldn’t call him kind. But he’d never beaten her. Up until the end, she would have said that he seemed like a decent fellow.
But he’d set a bounty on Mark’s head in an attempt to ruin the man’s reputation. And there was the matter of what he’d done to her. He wasn’t bad. Still, she could never forgive him, and now that she knew what a good man was, she could recall precisely how awful he’d made her feel. She’d been steeling herself to endure his presence ever since she’d made the appointment.
He smiled as she sat. “Congratulations, Jess. I knew you could do it—you just needed a little prodding on my part.”
Jess again. Mark had called her Jessica. As if she were a full person, not a truncated portion of one. “That’s a bit premature, don’t you think? I’ve not yet given you my report.”
“I can guess.” His smile stretched out, lazy, sure of itself. “Today, the first installment of a fallen woman’s account appeared in the London Social Mirror. It’s titled, ‘The Seduction of Sir Mark.’ The afternoon edition of every paper has picked up the refrain. I’m not an idiot, Jess. Well done. Everyone is already talking. And serializing the story? That was brilliant. Nobody will ever forget this. When Lefevre retires, I’ll take his place.”
Jessica thought of Mark’s ring. It hung on a chain from her neck. What would he do, if she showed it to him? “I admit, I don’t understand the ambition. You never struck me as one who cared about the poor.”
He shrugged. “What, and pass up the chance to determine which of my acquaintances can harness the product of the workhouses? The Commission decides who gets the contracts for the food, the blankets. They decide what the workhouse produces, and who benefits from it. A man who has that kind of power can get a great many favors. And it will undoubtedly serve as a stepping-stone to other, greater, callings.”
Jessica felt her lip curl a little.
“The opportunity would have been wasted on Sir Mark,” Weston said. “He has no head for politics or organization—just philosophy and ethics. You’ve not just done me a favor—you’ve done a favor to all of England.”
Jessica shook her head. “You are still making a great many assumptions. I came here because—”
He smiled at her indulgently. “I know why you came. You always did want to make sure the details were squared away. Here.” He pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and slid it across the table. “You’ve earned it.”
She waited until he pulled his hand away before she looked at the paper. It was a bank draft. She hadn’t come here to take his money. She’d come here to denounce him.
But that was before she’d seen that he’d made the cheque out in the amount of three hundred pounds. She tasted bitter charcoal. She lifted her eyes to him. “How odd. We agreed on fifteen hundred.”
He gave her a negligent smile. “Come, Jess. You know I’m not overly wealthy. Besides, I’ve a reputation to maintain—I can’t be throwing all my free capital into whores, no matter what sort of benefits they offer me.”
Jessica tapped her fingers against the paper. “I don’t see how the state of your funds is any concern of mine. I certainly don’t care about your reputation. We had a deal, you and I. It was spelled out. Quite clearly.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked. “Take me to court? You know that our little bargain is quite unenforceable.” He leaned across the table, his hand reaching to brush against the side of her cheek. “If you want to earn the rest, you know how you can get it.”
She slapped his hand away. “Why would you suppose that you could motivate me to enter into one contract with you by reneging on another?”
He didn’t say anything, simply shaking his head.
It wasn’t as if it was the first time he’d done this to her. She’d had a contract with him before—she’d insisted on it. And when it had come down to it, he’d broken that one, too—splintered it clean in half, nearly killing her in the process. He wasn’t a bad man. He was just…an unthinking pinchpenny. He’d put his pocketbook before his obligations once before. She shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d done so again.
“I wouldn’t touch you for twice that amount.” She glanced down at the bank draft. “For any sum.”
“Come now, I wasn’t that bad. I would think that after being pawed over by a virgin, you’d welcome a man of some experience.”
She stood. “Sir Mark made me feel more when he touched my hand than you ever managed.”
His jaw worked, and he reached for the cheque. Without thinking, Jessica slammed her hand over it and glared at him. She hadn’t earned it—he only thought she had. In truth, she had no right to the funds. But then…
The memory of those months after he’d so casually broken their last contract came to mind. The illness. The darkness. The feeling that she would never hope for the future again. He could never repay her for those months. He could never banish the sadness she would carry, not with every penny in his accounts. He owed her.
She couldn’t collect. But she had already humiliated him; he just didn’t know it yet. When he read the final chapter in the serial she’d written, he would understand precisely what she’d done.
By the time that happened, she’d have taken his funds. He didn’t know where she was staying, and in a few weeks, she would leave London for good. It wasn’t justice—she could never get justice for what he’d done to her. But it was indubitably right.
“Jess,” he said. “Do be reasonable.”
She folded up the draft and slipped it into her pocket. “My name isn’t Jess.”
“No? Then what should I call you?”
“Weston,” she said simply, “you’re not going to see me. If you look for me, I’ll leave.”
“And what if I insist?”
She lowered her voice. “I’ll shoot you. Stay away from me.”
“Jess!” he called after her.
But she wasn’t turning back, not for him. Not ever. She held her head high and marched onward.
AFTER MARK’S WALKING TRIP, London was…gray.
Even though they’d not talked about Jessica, Smite must have sensed Mark was still unhappy, because he’d accompanied Mark and Ash to London without a word of explanation. He’d even agreed to attend a soiree. He’d probably done so to make sure Mark had no time to think on that first evening back.
It was the first time that all three of the Turners had ever appeared at a soiree together. They’d arrived in town only just in time to wash and dress for the event that evening. They entered the room, Mark’s brothers flanking him on either side.
Heads turned as they were announced. Mark shouldn’t have been surprised. Ash was a duke; Mark still seemed possessed of an inexplicable popularity. And Smite was wealthy,
good-looking…and never around, which made everyone wonder about him.
Mark had been away from London—away from polite society in its entirety—long enough that he’d forgotten what it was like to attend one of these events. Everyone was looking at him. This was normal, he reminded himself. Everyone was always looking at him; it was only his imagination that found a trace of pity in their gazes. They didn’t know what had happened while he was gone. None of them did.
This was just the usual adoration that he collected, simply because he was a knight, because he was popular and because he was wealthy. It chafed more than usual tonight.
But when he looked to either side of him he realized that he was wealthy. Just not in the way that these people thought. There had been lean years before Ash had made his fortune; Mark could still bring to mind the feeling of hunger, not so much a memory as an occasional itch that sometimes tickled the back of his mind from time to time. And yet…if there was luxury in this world, it wasn’t velvet waistcoats or top hats. It wasn’t a perfectly sprung carriage or marchpane delicacies served on silver platters.
It was this—this certainty that without his even asking, his brothers would stand at his side. Even Smite. Even in this crowd. All his life, his brothers had protected him. He’d been born rich.
Perhaps that was why he found the strength to paste a false smile on his face, to clasp hands with a friend he’d not seen in months. Perhaps that was why he could dismiss the sidelong glances, the murmurs behind shielded hands. Perhaps that was why he could converse easily and pretend that nothing had happened in his absence. He knew that his brothers were there for him, a foundation that would never crumble no matter what he faced.
It was even easy to ask a young lady to dance, although he somehow missed her name when they’d been introduced. He could pretend perfectly; all he had to do was act by rote, like a clockwork knight wound up for a performance.
But he had only to think of what he was not pretending about, and the memory returned, shocking and vivid. The women at the ball were faded portraits of femininity compared to Jessica. She was warmer, more vibrant. And though the woman he was waltzing with—a debutante who watched him with a puzzled look on her face—was quite pretty, he could hardly attend to her conversation.
The Turner Series Page 59