by Mia Marlowe
So why was Hartley keeping company with this man?
Lord Blackwood handed Hartley’s waistcoat and jacket back to him. “Fancy the chit, do you? Well, that explains a good bit. Very well. If you won’t work with me, you’re on your own.” He trotted away after the other two. Then he stopped with a hand to his temple as if something had just occurred to him, and turned back. He tossed the money pouch to Hartley. “Your winnings, though I’ve a feeling you value the prize with feet far more.”
Blackwood cast her a sly smile and loped after his friends. Hartley shrugged on his waistcoat, tucking the money pouch into the interior pocket. Then he draped his jacket around Rebecca’s shoulders.
She hadn’t even realized she was shivering. She wasn’t cold, exactly. The shakes were probably due to the delayed realization of how very dire her situation had been. Lord Hartley took her by the elbow and hurried her in the opposite direction from his companions.
A heartfelt thank you danced on the tip of her tongue, but he interrupted her thoughts before she could form the right words.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” he said bluntly.
As saviors went, Hartley was a surly one. He certainly didn’t sound captivated by her now. “You don’t think I’m here on purpose, do you?”
“Only a ninnyhammer would wander into Whitechapel by accident.”
Not captivated at all. Rebecca swallowed back her indignation. “There’s no need for name-calling. If you must know, I was abducted near Leadenhall Market.”
She’d journeyed across town with her maid because the market was supposed to have the freshest produce from the country. Her mother had been craving Ashmead’s Kernel apples. The fruits weren’t much to look at, being a drab color, but they were known for pear-like sweetness. Her mother’s cough had gotten worse as the autumn weather turned colder. Rebecca hoped the treat would tempt her dwindling appetite.
As she’d wandered among the stalls, she’d become separated from her maid. Then, before she could cry out, those foul men from the Green Cockerel had seized her and borne her to Whitechapel.
“Who’s your father, and why does he allow you out without a keeper?” Hartley demanded.
“I do not require a keeper.” The man still hadn’t bothered to formally introduce himself or inquire after her name. Some of what Freddie had said about Lord Hartley leaped to the forefront of Rebecca’s mind. Vulgar upstart. Raised in obscurity. Questionable parentage. “Not that it’s any of your concern, but my father is Baron Kearsey and—”
He clamped a hand over her mouth and yanked her into a darkened doorway. A loud gang from the boxing crib crossed an intersection behind them. Once the ruffians passed, Hartley stood motionless for the space of ten heartbeats before he released her.
“Come.” He took her hand and pulled her along, not moderating his longer stride to accommodate her narrow column gown one bit.
“Instead of manhandling me,” Rebecca said as she skittered to keep up, “you might have simply asked me to be quiet.”
“Fine. Be quiet.”
Lord Hartley was the most insufferably rude man she’d ever met. Freddie had been right to cut him. The warm glow in her chest faded completely. “Haven’t you any notion of how to treat a lady? No. I suppose not. Not after the way you pushed yourself forward at the museum.”
“I don’t recall hearing you complain of the way I pushed myself forward in the Green Cockerel.” He kept looking back for signs of pursuit.
Ahead of them, Rebecca made out the dark outline of a hackney waiting for a fare. The horses’ heads were drooped and so was the cabbie’s, on his perch above the coach. Lord Hartley put two fingers between his lips and whistled loudly. The cabbie chirruped to his nags, and the hackney moved toward them with a rattle over the uneven cobbles.
Lord Hartley opened the hackney door and practically shoved her in. “Where are you staying?”
“Our town house is in Grosvenor Square.” It was a lease her father had prepaid before the start of the Season. Otherwise, her family would have been turned out to pay off the baron’s latest gambling debts. But Lord Hartley didn’t need to know that.
“The heart of Mayfair.” He snorted. “Of course it is. Everyone who’s anyone lives there.”
He relayed the address to the cabby and climbed in after her, taking the opposite squab. The hackney lurched forward, and they clattered over the cobbles at a surprising pace.
Rebecca laced her fingers on her lap to keep her hands still. She was grateful to have escaped from that horrid Green Cockerel, but if the incident became known, her reputation would not survive the night. Botheration, it probably won’t survive a hackney ride with a strange man either.
Freddie was right. No matter how handsome he was, no matter that he’d rescued her from what her friend would call “a fate worse than death,” there was no doubt about it: this gentleman from the museum was trouble.
Two
Favoring one son over another never bodes well for either of them. Consider Cain and Abel. Let us hope I can undo the damage of Somerset’s past before it comes to that desperate pass. Yes, yes, I know I’m the one who did the damage, but that’s all the more reason why I should be the one to mend it!
—Phillippa, the Dowager Marchioness of Somerset
The wheels of the cab clacked loudly, but the silence inside the conveyance was deafening. Since light from the occasional gas lamp only lit the hackney for fleeting moments, it was too dark to see Lord Hartley properly most of the time. Despite that, Rebecca was uncomfortably aware of his presence. He was a large enough man not to fold neatly into the small space. His knees brushed hers at intervals, sending uncomfortable prickles up her thighs. He was entirely too…too male to be cornered in a cab with.
Finally, Rebecca could stand no more of the silence. If he wasn’t going to be civil, at least she would.
“My family will be very grateful to you, Lord Hartley.”
“So it seems you know my name without benefit of proper introduction,” he said. If a voice could be said to have a flavor, his was a dark, chocolatey sort of sound. It poured over her in luscious waves. “What about you, Miss Kearsey? Yes, I paid attention when you said your father was the baron. Aren’t you grateful too?”
“Of course I am.” Why was he scolding her like some underpaid tutor? “I…thank you too. It was…kindly done.”
“Tell that to my ribs.”
Silence descended on them again, like a flock of crows that had been disturbed briefly before settling again to pick at the bones. The image reminded Rebecca of gossips as well, and some of what Freddie had told her about Lord Hartley came back to her.
“Your family is looking for you,” she said.
“Is that so?”
“Yes, by all accounts, your brother and sister-in-law—”
“Half brother,” he corrected.
Yes, that squared with Freddie’s information. “And your grandmother is here in London as well. I understand she is most upset not to have found you at your family’s town house.”
“Far be it from me to upset the dowager,” Hartley said in a tone that suggested he’d prefer to do exactly that. They’d reached a better neighborhood where gas lamps were more frequent, and she could see his face at every corner. She wondered that she’d found him merely handsome before. Now his well-sculpted features were so forbidding, he was like some vengeful minor deity.
She might have even feared him a little if he hadn’t just saved her from an awful situation. The silence was back, and she felt as if something inside her might burst if she didn’t fill it. “If you aren’t staying at the Somerset town house, where have you been?”
“Here and there. It didn’t take long to discover I don’t belong in Mayfair.”
His eyes took on a hard look. He didn’t bear much resemblance to the affable gentleman from the museum any longe
r. In that moment, Rebecca wasn’t sure she’d have known him if she passed him on the street.
“I’m like water,” he said.
“Running incessantly?”
“No, seeking the lowest place.”
“Why do you seek that?”
“Because it’s where I belong.” He pretended great absorption with the blur of houses on the right as they moved along. “Where I’ve always belonged.”
Now she remembered more of the gossip that dear Freddie had tried to pass on about this Lord Hartley fellow. It seemed he’d been raised in the country as the unwanted child of an anonymous gentleman and his light-o’-love. In deference to his absent father’s station, he’d been educated at Eton and later at Oxford. But then, in a sudden explosion of scandal early in the summer, it was learned that the Marquess of Somerset had actually wed this new Lord Hartley’s mother.
The entire line of inheritance in one of the greatest houses of England had been disrupted. It was not the sort of transgression the ton readily forgave. The new Lord Hartley bore the brunt of Polite Society’s collective displeasure.
The hackney slowed as they entered Grosvenor Square. All the town houses were dark, save one on the left side. In that four-story edifice, every window blazed with light. The entire household was awake. Her father had probably sent for a team of Bow Street Runners to hunt for her in the Leadenhall Market district. Rebecca hoped they’d somehow kept the situation from her mother. Strong emotion made her breathing even more labored than usual.
“That must be your home,” Lord Hartley said. When she nodded, he rapped on the ceiling of the cab to signal a stop. Then he opened the door and handed her out with instructions for the cabbie to wait for him. They were a few houses down from hers, so he offered her his arm. She expected him to escort her up to the door, but he stopped just outside the wrought iron gate that enclosed the minuscule front garden.
Rebecca rested a hand on the gatepost. “You’re coming in too, aren’t you?”
Hartley shook his head. “Trust me, they don’t want me there.”
But I want you danced on her tongue. She bit the words back. Where on earth had those wholly inappropriate sentiments come from?
“I’m certain my father will want to thank you personally.”
“Perhaps, but I doubt it will improve your reputation if I intrude at this time. Besides, my friends are still in a dicey neighborhood. I need to discover whether they have found safety or if they require my assistance.”
He’d lost that belligerent look somewhere between the cab and her front door. When she glanced up at him now, she caught a glimpse of the boy he must have been—unacknowledged, inconvenient, and unwanted; always on the fringes of the great, but never allowed into the inner circle. Her chest constricted a bit.
“But why must you return to Whitechapel? What of your family?” Rebecca said. “As far as they know, you’ve been missing for far longer than I was. Won’t you please go home to Somerset House?”
He shook his head and pushed open the gate for her. “I’ll watch till you are inside.”
Rebecca gave up and dipped in a shallow curtsy. “Thank you, Lord Hartley. For everything.”
Then she hurried up to her door and slipped inside. She didn’t latch it though. Instead, she watched as Lord Hartley strode back to the hackney, his gait swift and determined. Then, with her eye to the slit in the door, she lingered until the cab pulled away and was swallowed up in darkness.
Lord Hartley had saved her this night. She owed him. He might not want her interference. He might resent her sticking her oar in. He might fight her tooth and nail, but somehow Miss Rebecca Kearsey was determined to save him as well.
* * *
“Where did you find him, my lord?”
“Whitechapel.”
Concerned voices reached into the blackness and dragged John back up to skim the surface of consciousness. He didn’t open his eyes, but he was vaguely aware that he no longer reeked of blood. He seemed to be tucked into a feather bed whose crisp linen sheets smelled faintly of lye soap.
“A dicey place, that Whitechapel, and no mistake.” John recognized the speaker as Aloysius Porter, his new valet and the first servant he’d ever had.
“I only wish ‘dicey’ was the operative word, Mr. Porter. He’d have been much safer if he’d been embroiled in a game of hazard.” The second voice belonged to John’s nearly perfect half brother, Lord Richard Barrett. They’d met after the scandal first broke. Richard had been deputized by the Marquess of Somerset to travel to Wiltshire and tell John who he really was. John hadn’t believed much of what Richard was saying at the time. His half brother seemed to be taking the loss of his preferential place far too calmly. John recognized the same even-tempered tones now.
“My brother engaged in a bare-knuckle brawl in one of those back-alley sparring cribs,” Richard was saying. “Apparently, there was a considerable purse wagered.”
“And apparently, his lordship lost.” Porter sounded appropriately downhearted over the situation, but then John’s valet often sounded like that for no reason at all.
“Actually, no.” Richard’s voice, on the other hand, was laced with a combination of disbelief and grudging admiration. “Lord Hartley won. Miss Kearsey said, and I quote, ‘You should have seen the other fellow.’”
Miss Kearsey? What the devil does she have to do with anything?
John didn’t open his eyes even now. It seemed the wiser course to allow his valet and half brother to assume he was insensible while they fussed over him and smoothed down the sheets. Besides, he was quite certain he couldn’t open the left one in any case.
He was evidently back in the Somerset town house, whether he willed it or no.
“Not wanting to speak out of turn, my lord,” Porter began as he always did before he intended to go ahead and speak out of turn, “but this is only the latest in a long string of peccadilloes his lordship has been involved in since coming to London. He’s been carousing with a disreputable group of gentlemen who do not deserve the name. I fear they have led him into all manner of mischief.”
John’s lips twitched. How like Porter to name the activities of the Daemon Club as “mischief.” If his friends heard it, they’d feel honor bound to lower their standards to earn a more wicked rating.
“Why is his lordship engaging in such unseemly activities?” Porter asked, his tenor drifting even higher in pitch than usual.
“God knows,” Richard said, “and perhaps we should leave it with Him. At any rate, Lord Hartley paid for his sins handsomely this evening. That’ll be quite a shiner.”
John wondered if it was hard for his half brother to refer to him as Lord Hartley. For all of Richard Barrett’s privileged life, that had been his title.
“From what I could learn from the link boy on the scene,” Richard went on, “after his lordship won the boxing match and escorted Miss Kearsey home in safety, he returned to Whitechapel to look for his friends. He was subsequently set upon by a gang of some dozen ruffians who relieved him of his newly bulging purse and left him bleeding in the street.”
In the pause that followed, John imagined his half brother shaking his head in reproof.
“The friends who urged him to wander into that district in the first place evidently fled without him,” Richard finished.
And why shouldn’t they have? John almost said aloud. The credo of the Daemon Club was “Do as thou wilt.” A man was answerable to no one but himself. John made his own choices and stood by them. He couldn’t fault his friends for making theirs.
A door opened with a soft snick of the latch, and the swish of feminine skirts was followed by a fresh scent of violets. Lady Richard, no doubt. His brother rarely went anywhere without his new wife, Sophie Barrett, née Goodnight. Richard had even brought her with him when he first came to see John in Wiltshire. She was a fabulous heir
ess and, even though she had a reputation for meddlesomeness and doing the unexpected, when the fellows of the Daemon Club heard about her ponderous dowry, they all said Richard was deucedly lucky to land her. It was more than enough blunt to make a fellow forget she was common.
But John doubted they’d dare say that in Richard Barrett’s hearing.
“Her ladyship sent me to relieve you.” The woman who entered the room wasn’t Lady Sophie after all. John’s fingers curled into frustrated fists under the sheets. The gentle voice belonged to Miss Rebecca Kearsey.
She was the last person John wanted to see him like this, all weak and miserable. In fact, after the danger she’d been subjected to already this night, she shouldn’t see him at all. She was from another world. He didn’t want her to face any more ugliness from Whitechapel, and judging by how he felt, he was the personification of it. As she drew near his bedside, he heard her sharp intake of breath.
After the beating by that mob, he must look even worse than he imagined.
“The doctor says he likely hasn’t suffered any permanent damage,” Richard said. “But he hasn’t stirred.”
“He will. He seems to have a very hard head,” Miss Kearsey said without a drop of womanly sympathy. “Please, my lord, take your ease. I’ll sit with him till he wakes. I often nurse my mother when she has a bad spell. If he should take a turn for the worse, I’ll call you on the moment.”
“Here. Let me fetch a chair for you, miss.”
John heard the sound of Porter dragging the heavy Tudor-styled monstrosity across the room and depositing it beside his bed. Richard made a halfhearted protest about leaving, but Porter managed to shuffle him out of the room. Silence descended. Blood stomped in John’s ears like a retreating giant’s footfalls.
“You needn’t pretend, you know,” she said softly. “I can tell you’re awake.”
He forced open his one good eye. Now that she wasn’t all tied up and terrified, she was as lovely as ever. Her mint-green eyes were filled with concern, but the soft brown brows that arched over them were drawn into a frown.