Marriage Made in Shame. Sophia James

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СКАЧАТЬ the roiling nausea seemed to settle with her words, the information comforting somehow.

      ‘Mam said I should come to London to her sister, who was doing more than well.’ She shook her brown curls and laughed. ‘I don’t think she realises exactly what it is Aunt Mary is up to, but, with little other in the way of paying work back home, I agreed to come in and try it. We haven’t yet though, have we?’ And, with colourful language, she went on to say just what it was they hadn’t yet done.

      Gabriel turned towards the window. The phrases she used were coarse, but the talk was relaxing him. Perhaps such candour was what kept the blood from his ears and his breath even. Small steps in the right direction. Tiny increments back to a healing. If he could only stop thinking and do the deed once...

      Reality brought his attention to the problem before him as he looked down. Flaccid. Unmoving. The scar tissue on his right thigh and groin in the light from the window was brutal and he pulled his breeches up.

      But she was off the bed in a flash, one warm hand clutching his arm. ‘Can you stay for a while, sir? Only a little while so that...’ She stopped as though trying to formulate what she wanted to say next.

      ‘So your aunt will think you at least earned your keep?’

      ‘Exactly that, sir, and it is nice here talking with you. You smell good, too.’

      He laughed at this and removed her hand. Sitting here was not the agony he had imagined after the fiasco in the Temple of Aphrodite and he gestured to her to pour more wine, which she did, handing it to him with a smile. His beaker was chipped on one side so he turned it around.

      ‘Jack used to say we would be married with a dozen children before we knew it and look what happened to him. Life is like a game of chess, I’d be thinking. One moment you are winning everything and the next you are wiped off the board.’

      ‘You play chess?’

      ‘I do, sir. My father taught me when I were little. He was a mill worker, too, you understand, but a gent once taught him the rudiments of the game in a tavern out of Styal in Cheshire and he never forgot it. I have my board and pieces with me. We could play if you like? To waste a bit of time?’

      The wine was cheap, but the room was warm and as the girl brought her robe off of a hook and wrapped it around herself, Gabriel breathed out.

      Little steps, he reiterated to himself. Little tiny steps. And this was the first.

      * * *

      An hour later after a close game Gabriel extracted a golden guinea from his pocket and gave it to her. ‘For your service, Sarah, and for your kindness.’

      Bringing the coin between perfectly white teeth, she bit down upon it. Still young enough not to have lost them, still innocent enough to imagine that gold might be a cure for the dissolution of morality. A trade-off that at this point in her life still came down on the black side of credit. God, he muttered to himself as he grabbed his jacket.

      Henrietta Clements had been the same once. Hopeful and blindly trusting.

      He brought out his card from a pocket and laid it down on the lumpy straw mattress. ‘Can you read?’

      She shook her head.

      ‘If you ever want to escape this place, find someone who can, then, and send word to me for help. I could find you more...respectable work.’

      She was off of the bed in a moment, the scent of her skin pungent and sharp as she threaded her arms about his neck.

      ‘If you lay down, I’d do all the work, sir. Like a gift to you seeing as you have been so nice and everything.’

      Full lips closed over his and Gabriel could feel an earnest innocence. The pain of memory lanced over manners as he pushed her back.

      ‘No.’ A harsher sound than he meant, with things less hidden.

      ‘You won’t be calling again?’ Sarah made no attempt at hiding her disappointment. ‘Not even for another game of chess?’

      ‘I’m afraid I won’t.’ The words were stretched and quick, but as manners laced through reason he added others. ‘But thank you. For everything.’

       Chapter Three

      The stone was cold, rubbed smooth with the echoes of time. He had tried to reach her, through the tapestries of Christ under thorns, but the choking smoke had stopped him, the only sound in his ears the one of a ghastly silence.

       His dagger was in his fist, wrapped around anger, the Holy Water knocked from its place on the pulpit and falling on to marble pocked with time. The spectre of death had him, even as he reached for Henrietta, the trickle of red running down his fingers and her eyes lifeless.

      * * *

      Gabriel woke with the beat of his heart loud in his ears and his hands gripping the sheets beneath him.

      The same bloody dream, never in time, never quick enough to save her. He cursed into fingers cradled across his mouth, hard harsh words with more than a trace of bitterness within as his eyes went to the timepiece on the mantel.

      Six o’clock. An hour’s sleep at least. Better than some nights, worse than others. Already the first birds were calling and the working city moved into action. The street vendors with their words and their incantations. ‘Milk maids below.’ ‘Four for sixpence, mackerel.’ The heavier sound of a passing carriage drowned them out.

      Unexpectedly the image of the water-blue eyes of Miss Adelaide Ashfield came to mind, searing through manners and propriety on the seat at the edge of the Bradfords’ ballroom as she cursed about her ten more weeks.

      Where did she reside in London? he wondered. With her uncle in his town house on Grosvenor Square or in the home of Lady Harcourt? Did she frequent many of the ton’s soirées or was she choosy in her outings?

      Swearing under his breath, he rose. He had no business to be thinking of her; she would be well counselled to stay away from him and as soon as he had caught those who were helping Clements in his quest for Napoleon’s ascendency he, too, would be gone.

      The society mamas were more circumspect with him now, the failing family fortune common knowledge and the burned-out shell of the Wesley seat of Ravenshill Manor unattended. His father had squandered most of what had been left to them after his grandfather’s poor management, and Gabriel had been trying to consolidate the Wesley assets ever since. The bankers no longer courted him, neither did the businessmen wanting the backing of old family money to allow them an easy access to ideas. It would only be a matter of time before society turned its back altogether.

      But he’d liked talking with Adelaide Ashfield from Dorset. This truth came from nowhere and he smiled. God, the unusual and prickly débutante was stealing his thoughts and he did not even want to stop and wonder why.

      She reminded him of a time in his life when things had been easier, he supposed, when conflict could be settled with the use of his fists and when he had gone to bed at midnight and slept until well past the dawn.

      What would happen after the СКАЧАТЬ