Ever His Bride

by Linda Needham

  Chapter 22

  Hunter had stormed back into the theater intending to find Meath and make a start at repairing the damage. But his focus was blurred, and dangerous. The image behind his eyes wasn’t Meath’s seething anger; it was his wife’s look of absolute despair, her sea-misted eyes, her lower lip caught fearlessly in her teeth: a too-recent ghost that would not be shaken.

  And now he sat starkly alone in his private box, neither listening to the music nor plotting his next meeting with Lord Meath. He was trying to control his quaking. How the devil could he talk coherently and convincingly with Meath when his hands were quavering, and his throat was closed off to all but the shallowest breath?

  She had betrayed him. He’d begun to believe in her lies, in her gallant beliefs. Save the child and you will save the man. Well, he didn’t need saving, damn it. He’d been perfectly fine all these years. He would be so again. He would bleed, but he would heal.

  And now he’d had no choice but to rid himself of her. He couldn’t risk the next headline, his low-born past thrown up at him: pickpocket, thief, scoundrel. Old habits die hard, they would say.

  Already he would be years repairing his name and his reputation. Protecting his clients had been his doctrine, the bedrock of the Claybourne Exchange. He had survived personal terrors and financial setbacks of all kinds, yet he’d always come back stronger and wiser than ever. He would again this time.

  He couldn’t let one impulsive young woman tear down his empire. Not even if he loved her more than he loved himself. Not even then. The fact had no bearing on the matter of his fortune and his future.

  He was in no mood to think, or to plot, least of all to see Lord Meath. So he sat in the hissing darkness of the theater, dismissing the scent of lavender, with the aching pressure of her gloves still lodged against his heart. He rose before the end of the final scene, unable to recall the name of the opera or even a single melody, and made his way onto Bow Street to hire a cab.

  Branson met him at the portico.

  “I waited two hours, Mr. Claybourne, sir, and your missus didn’t show up.”

  Hunter glanced around, half-expecting to see her scowling from behind a pillar. “You didn’t take her home?”

  “Never saw her, sir. I thought she’d decided to stay.”

  “That decision wasn’t hers to make.” Hunter fought a groundless panic. It didn’t matter. Felicity Mayfield was gone from his life; he would teach himself not to care. “She must have found her own way home.”

  “Yes sir.” But Branson was frowning.

  Hunter rode all the way to Claybourne Manor, having convinced himself that she had taken her own cab home just to spite him. He expected to find her stalking the foyer with a well-rehearsed diatribe against him and his breed. Heartless magnate, purveyor of poverty, thief.

  Let her come at him with her accusations. He was ready for her. He would not bend. She was a pariah to him, and nothing she could say would soften the truth or his determination to be rid of her. It couldn’t possibly. This time the truth was undeniable.

  But she wasn’t in the foyer or in his chamber, or hers. She hadn’t used her own room in since the night he’d returned after the train accident, except to dress in when she needed more light and a longer mirror. And now her chamber looked as it had when they’d left it for the theater, the bed in disarray from their lovemaking. He smoothed his hand across the rumpled sheets. He’d caught her here in her dressing gown and had stripped her of it. As ever, she was eager and inventive, and had wrapped him in her selfless splendor. And afterward they had talked of children—

  Children.

  “She’s not in the house, sir.” Branson stood at the door alongside Mrs. Sweeney, both of them looking confused and lost.

  Mrs. Sweeney cuffed Branson. “You louts have misplaced our girl!”

  Branson started away. “I’ll go back to London for her, sir. We can’t leave her to—”

  “No, Branson.” The sooner the break was made, the sooner his life and the house would return to normal. “Have this room cleaned and closed up tomorrow,” he said abruptly. “Mrs. Claybourne won’t be back.”

  “Won’t—”

  But Hunter dismissed their fallen faces with a scowl and brushed past them into his own chamber.

  The windows were open and the breeze tucked itself in and out among the folds of the drapes. Felicity likened fresh air to sleeping in the wild, and had promised to show him the delights of the Lakes. That was impossible now, seemed a bleak and desolate notion without her. He closed the window and drew the drapes.

  He’d find no sleep in this room tonight.

  He made his way to his library and sat at his desk, pen in hand, ready to devise a scheme that would bring Lord Meath and his cohorts around. The man would need something of great worth to make up for the loss of business. High profits and little risk. He’d also have to pay for the loss of integrity that Meath and the others were sure to suffer at the hands of the press, when Felicity’s story made the Times.

  He hadn’t known of Meath’s investments in the apprentice schools, but the truth didn’t matter now. Wouldn’t have mattered then. It was simple commerce; he couldn’t let it matter.

  But he could wonder if Felicity was sleeping tonight on a bench in Euston Station—if he would ever see her again.

  He had given her the power to ruin him and she had wielded it with precision, even when she had promised she wouldn’t. He had no choice but to take that power back from her.

  He set aside Lord Meath’s scheme and forced his pen to write the words that would begin his separation from his wife. The phrases swam in front of him. He blinked them clear, and blotted the page where the ink now ran salty.

  He would not weep for the woman. Her sweetness had been most seductive; he had slipped his hand into hers, had rested his heart inside hers, had raised his hopes and renewed his dreams …

  But he was nothing without his name and his fortune.

  And so he would learn to live without her.

  Felicity spent the night on a narrow bench in the schoolroom, and awoke from a dream where Hunter loved her and she was wildly contented, where a child slept in her arms and it was his, and he was smiling down on them both with a love that would endure any hardship.

  And her arms still ached from wanting him.

  The impossible sweetness followed her through the morning. The children had hugged her and begged for her stories, and she had worn herself weary with their energy. She had changed from her gown into a clean but tattered brown skirt and a high-collared bodice, whose blue had long ago faded to gray. She needed to return the expensive gown to Hunter before the lush black satin was ruined by little handprints or stolen by hungry fingers. And since the sewing parlor at Claybourne Manor was filled with goods that actually belonged to the Beggar’s Academy, she would need to make arrangements for their return.

  And she was still wearing the pearl necklace he had given her. Worth ten times the price of the Beggar’s Academy, it was too precious to keep on the premises, and it would only serve to remind her of him.

  It seemed she had business at the Claybourne Exchange, and the sooner done, the better. Felicity left the school at noon with the gown and the pearls, and by the time she reached Cornhill Street, her temper was heated to the boiling point. She’d married an arrogant, hard-hearted man. Then she’d gone and fallen in love with him. And now, she probably had his child tucked beneath her heart.

  The doorman smiled when he recognized her, but raised his eyebrows at the reduced state of her clothing. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Claybourne.”

  “Miss Mayfield,” she corrected as she passed him.

  She kept up a strong head of steam as she climbed the pristine staircase, for fear of losing the momentum she would need when she met Hunter face-to-face.

  She plowed through the outer office. “Good afternoon, Tilson.” And threw open the doors of Hunter’s office.

  He was alone. Peering out the drape-darkened win
dow, his finger caught in the velvet folds.

  “Hunter.” His name came too softly to her lips, tasted bittersweet.

  He turned his head: a glacial precipice in motion, yet firmly rooted in the earth. She wanted to run to him, but he looked monumentally unapproachable.

  “Yes?” he said, no more interested than if she were a client about to inquire into the state of her business affairs. God forgive the man his coldness.

  Felicity closed the door behind her and stepped resolutely into the room.

  “I’ve come to return the gown I wore last night,” she said, draping the dress over a chairback.

  “It’s yours, Miss Mayfield. Keep it.” His voice was so relentlessly solid, it settled like a lead weight in her chest.

  “Then I leave you to burn it, Hunter.” She bit back her tears as she withdrew the string of pearls from her pocket, and let the strand clatter into a loose pile onto the table. “These are yours, too.”

  He turned away then, back to the window. “Keep them. Sell them, if you wish. They mean nothing to me.

  “They’ve meant a lot to me, Hunter, because they were a gift from you, my husband. But I have no use for the money or the pearls now. However, there are clothes and unfinished projects in the sewing parlor at Claybourne Manor, that belong to the academy—”

  “Take the lot of it, Miss Mayfield.” He left the window and went to his desk. “Strip the house bare, if it pleases you.”

  “I’ll have to arrange—”

  “Speak with Branson about it.” He unlocked the top drawer and drew out a sheaf of papers. “Anything else, Miss Mayfield?”

  She absorbed the smell of leather, paper, and ink, the arid aroma of commerce, and she felt stronger for it, able to see past some of her grief and into the business at hand.

  The breaking of her heart away from his.

  “I’m returning your name to you, Mr. Claybourne.” She saw him pause in his paper-shuffling.

  “Fine.” He continued adding documents to the sheaf, and she wanted to weep.

  “You’ve never given me the chance to be anything more than Miss Mayfield to you, a very temporary wife. I never knew from one day to the next which name you felt me worthy enough to wear. So I’m taking back my old name, once and for all, and returning yours, worse for the wear it seems, but obviously the best course for the both of us.”

  His movements were aggravatingly mechanical.

  “Very well, Miss Mayf—”

  “Hunter, you have to believe that I am sorry—”

  “Enough, Miss Mayfield.”

  “No. You’ll hear me out. I’m sorry about your position with Commission of Railways. I know how much that meant to you, and I wouldn’t have taken that from you for the world.”

  “But the truth is that you have taken it.” He leafed through his papers, looking bored. “You and your squandered benevolence.”

  “Hunter Claybourne!” Felicity went to the front of his desk, shamed to her soul at the change in him. “I’m not going to apologize for my article. It was long past due. I plan to investigate other apprentice schools, and write many more. I will be ruthless in my criticism of men like Lord Meath. I have to be a champion—for Giles and for Andy and Betts. And for you, Hunter—”

  “I don’t need your pity, Miss Mayfield.”

  “I would never give you any, Hunter.”

  His face was masked and deeply planed, the shadowy man she had met at the Cobson’s sponging house. A stranger who wanted for nothing, and needed no one, who could calmly sort through a stack of documents while her stomach roiled and her shoulders shook.

  “You simply don’t understand the nature of business, Miss Mayfield.”

  “Then I don’t want to know.”

  “In business there are carefully calibrated balances—”

  “Balances? The life of an innocent child balanced against what? A penny? A pound? A railway? What possible transaction can justify stealing Andy’s childhood from him? For leaving wounds that never heal. You know yourself how they fester—”

  “Enough, madam! You will listen for once, and then you will leave me!” He tossed the documents into his attaché. “Cheap labor is the foundation of manufacturing, do you understand me? And manufacturing is the foundation of this country—of this century, and the one to come. Every extra ha’penny that is paid out between the hide and the shoe seller raises the price of the shoe by a factor of four and reduces the profit—”

  “Profit? That’s your justification—”

  “Yes, profit. It is no crime. No shame.” He came around the desk as if he thought to intimidate her into agreeing with him. “Cheap shoes make for affordable shoes, Miss Mayfield. It’s the law of profits. Neither evil nor good, it’s just a matter of profit—”

  “Oh, curse you, Hunter, and all your kind.”

  “Are you so righteous, madam?” He grabbed her hand and turned her palm toward him. “So blinded you can’t see the blood on your own pristine hands?”

  His own large hands were icy and huge. He touched her ring, lingered there, and she prayed he wouldn’t take it. Not her ring. Not yet. “Blood on my hands? There is none!”

  “Are you so certain?” He paused, then dropped her hand abruptly. His eyes were colder than ever. “You pride yourself on making winter coats for your miserable wretches. Well, where the hell do you think the woolens come from?”

  “A mill, of course.” Felicity backed away from him toward the cold, tile-fronted heater. He was a storm about to lay waste to a field of ripe clover.

  “And have you ever seen the inside of a woolen mill, Miss Mayfield?”

  “No.” He’d backed her against the enamel tiles, and now she was forced to crane her neck to see into his face.

  “No?” He raised an arrogant brow, and she knew that he found great triumph in his truth. He growled and pushed himself away, then went back to the window, lifting back the heavy drape with his hand. “Well, I suggest you visit one next time you’re trooping through the countryside. You’ll find it most illuminating, but then you’ll have to swear off woolens and start weaving your own cloth. Do visit a coal mine next, Miss Mayfield, and you’ll freeze the next winter in your protest against those shocking conditions. And the same holds true of the factories that make your lovely ribbons and the pencils that you teach the beggars to write with—”

  “Stop it, Hunter! It won’t work. You can’t hobble me with my own guilt. Not like you’ve done to yourself.” He had never seemed so much a stranger, so much the coolly calculating industrialist as he watched out the window, aloof from everything and everybody. “I know that my garden is small, that its soil is exhausted, and that I’m as insignificant as a drop of rain in the ocean—but I will see that these few children grow and prosper. And they will know compassion, Hunter, and love, and will reach out gladly to those whose fortunes aren’t as bright as their own—”

  “Good day, Miss Mayfield.” He dropped the drape against the window and went back to his desk, presenting his broad back to her.

  How she ached for him, wanted to hold him one last time. She had hurt him immeasurably. But he had put himself past caring. She envied that in him, but refused to shrink from her own grieving. To do that would be to deny that she loved him.

  “You’re a good man, Hunter—far better than you know. And I would state that fact, unreservedly, even if I didn’t love you.”

  She had never gotten the chance to tell him about the baby; still wasn’t certain herself. He had promised his support when the time came, and that’s when she would ask for it – invoke Article Four if she had to. Not now, when her emotions were raw and she might do or say something foolish in front of him. If it were true, she would tell him months from now, when it might be easier to meet his eyes again.

  She gathered her courage and went to the door, paused with her hand on the latch.

  Hunter turned, knew that if he could watch her leave, he could let her go. Just let her go.

  “Good-bye, Hunt
er.”

  Then she was gone. Gone in her sagging-brimmed bonnet and her ragged brown skirt, leaving her soft fragrance to accuse him. Gone, at last.

  He wanted to follow after her, but he was cemented in place by his fears, and by his relief that she had survived the long night, that she’d been standing here in his office adorned in her rags and stinking of her orphans. He knew she had spent the night at the school. He’d heard Branson wheel the carriage into the darkness, and had been waiting for him when he returned with the news. But he couldn’t tell her that.

  His throat ached. He felt obscene and soiled again. He closed his eyes but he could still see the hollow-eyed children, could smell the stink of the workhouse on his skin.

  She had made him see too clearly, had absolved him with her charity, and then she’d convicted him for it.

  I don’t need you, Felicity. He needed the Claybourne Exchange, and nothing else.

  Already bluntly worded notes had begun to arrive from other men of Lord Meath’s rank and influence, asking pointed questions about exposure and trust. How could they trust a man who couldn’t control his own wife? How could he allow her to traipse the countryside? How could he not condemn her?

  How could she be so beautiful?

  And now he’d been summoned to a swiftly called meeting, deep in the bowels of the Bank of England. That meeting was to be about him.

  A question of his integrity. His honor. Hunter Claybourne’s name held up to its finest scrutiny.

  Whatever the cost, he was prepared to pay.

  Hunter descended the steps of the Claybourne Exchange and crossed Cornhill Street on foot, and then Threadneedle—shouldering his way past memories, shed of his years, his reputation, and his tattered coat, too large and stolen from a shopkeeper’s rack, but handsome. His pulse quickened with a familiar exhilaration and the scent of success tainted by fear. He had been the very best of pickpockets, distracting his quarry with a nudge, then a feint; risking little to chance because he’d known, even then, what was at stake.

  Now he stood on Threadneedle Street staring up at the Bank, feeling exposed and raw.