Wicked:. Noelle Mack

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      Some hours later, when the sunlight was swallowed by the gathering blue of dusk, she found water in an ewer standing in a matching basin. Lifting the ewer, she splashed a few drops on her arm, testing it too for poison. Her skin did not sting or peel off. It seemed to be only water. She soaked a cloth in it and scrubbed at her face, then combed her hair.

      She knew that Victor would come to her in due time—he preferred the night as a rule. Angelica wondered how he was connected to this house and whether he owned it. His recent inheritance would have been more than enough.

      If he lived here, the room she was in held no trace of him and seemed entirely feminine.

      Quietly as she could, she looked on shelves and opened and closed drawers, finding nothing of note. It seemed the sort of room that was used for assignations, with every sensual comfort but nothing of permanence about it.

      Hungry and unbearably thirsty—she would not drink of the water in the ewer—she sat in an armchair and thought of when she had seen him last.

      Victor had been dashing in his way, the younger image of his oafish father, her stepfather. Late and unlamented, Samuel Broadnax, who called himself a gentleman and was nothing of the kind, had been stricken with a fatal fever and died two days after her mother.

      Try as she might, Angelica could not summon up any tenderness for that lady, who had wanted nothing to do with her from the very day of her birth, handing her over to a string of nursery maids and governesses.

      They were all disagreeable and severe women to begin with and none had ever shown her the least kindness, per her mother’s command. Of that Angelica had no doubt, having found written instructions to each of them in her mother’s own handwriting.

      The least infraction earned her a vicious birching on her bare legs well into her teens, a punishment that she, too cowed to think of escape, simply endured after a lifetime of intimidation and petty cruelty.

      The revelation that her slightly older stepbrother had enjoyed watching the sessions shocked her greatly. She had never known at the time that he was there.

      She had come to understand, from the only sympathetic servant in the household, that young master Victor got his way through bribery and mutually satisfying exercises in perversity with the woman who administered her beatings and lessons in geography with such vigor.

      Still, the geography had come in handy—Angelica could not have found her way about London at all without her study of Roche’s map of it when she finally did escape from her stepfather’s country house.

      With a small sack of money and only the clothes on her back, she had survived, hired out through a servant’s agency as a lady’s maid owing to her good looks and breeding.

      The Congreves had been the last of three such assignments, and eluding Mr. Congreve’s moist grasp had proved impossible. Angelica had loathed his wife, and longed to leave, knowing on the night she was left to handle the cloaks and furs that it might be her last.

      Until Semyon Taruskin has come in to bring his coat to the wrong place, she had thought only of walking the streets as she had done.

      He had been kind. Even courteous. She was not accustomed to either. When he’d told her his name, she had remembered it from the endless flow of gossip among the female servants in the Congreves’ house.

      Besides that, it had seemed to her that she had seen him somewhere before and perhaps she had in her rambles. The parks of London were a respite for her and she wandered into them on the rare occasions when she had a half-day to herself.

      She was sure he rode and often. Her downcast eyes had not missed the strong muscles of his thighs, nor the strength of his calves. And he had the erect posture of an experienced horseman, from the top of his tousled dark head through his broad-shouldered back and long legs.

      He’d seemed every inch the gentleman to her. If he lived near or on a fine square by the parks that the ton frequented to see and be seen in, then perhaps he had noticed her and she had smiled back…

      Angelica strained to breathe through the sad tightness in her throat and forced all thoughts of her brief encounter with Semyon Taruskin away.

      She would have to save herself somehow. No one was riding to her rescue.

      Tears filled her eyes and rolled down her face, hot as her own blood. She didn’t have the strength to dash them away. As the last glimmering of day faded from the sky outside the windows, she fell into a troubled sleep in the armchair.

      An aching in her legs made her stir and slowly open her eyes—that, and the honeyed smell of beeswax. A man stood with his back to her, touching a lit candle to each wick of the tapers in a tall candelabra.

      She recognized him and tried to get up without making a sound, but her stiffness from sleeping in a chair kept her trapped for the moment. So СКАЧАТЬ