The Cinderella Countess. Sophia James

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СКАЧАТЬ do not. I need to think...’

      With care Belle placed her hand across thin fingers. ‘I give you my solemn oath that I shan’t speak of your condition to anyone.’

      ‘Thank you.’

      When she looked away Belle rose, tucking the book into the folds of cloth on the bed so that it would not fall.

      ‘I will see you on Wednesday.’

      Outside she found Lytton Staines where she had left him, a drink in hand.

      ‘I hope this visit will be as successful as your last.’

      ‘I shall see your sister again next week, your lordship. There will be no payment required.’

      ‘Miss Smith,’ he said, a sound of exasperation in the word.

      ‘Yes, your lordship.’

      ‘I am an earl. Ten pounds is nothing at all to me and I shall pay you exactly what I think you are worth.’

      ‘Are you made of money, then?’ For a second he stood so close she could feel the whisper of his breath against her cheek as he replied.

      ‘Yes.’

      She almost liked his certainty and his arrogance at that moment. He was a man who valued honesty just as his sister had said and he was kind. Of all the attributes in people, that, to Annabelle, was the most important.

      ‘I will also accompany you home.’

      ‘It is not necessary. I am quite capable of getting myself back to Whitechapel.’

      ‘I know you are, but I would like to see you safe.’

      ‘Very well.’

      She stepped back and he led the way downstairs, the wound on his left temple beginning to discolour. She would have offered to tend it, but something told her that he would decline such an invitation.

      A rich man, a brother, a son, an earl. A man with mistresses and with enemies. A man of generosity and cleverness, too. So many things that she now knew of him as well as so many things she did not. She wondered just what he might think of her?

      ‘Is my sister going to recover, do you think?’

      He asked her this as the carriage slid away from the curb. Today it travelled slowly and she thought the Earl had had some hand in that, for he had been speaking with the driver just before they left.

      Instead of answering his question she found one of her own. ‘How did your father die?’

      Her words were bare and shock ripped across his face.

      ‘Why do you wish to know that?’

      ‘Your sister said something that made me wonder.’

      ‘What did she say?’

      ‘She said that you were a thousand times better than he was.’

      ‘Hell and damnation.’

      She could not believe that she had heard the Earl swear in front of her and thought he might apologise for it, but instead he turned to look out of the window as he spoke again.

      ‘He killed himself.’

      He had asked her if she was a religious woman once and said that he did not put much stock in prayers. But she could see it did mean something, after all, for shock was etched on his face. He believed his father consigned to hell just as his sister did. A permanent banishment. An unchangeable tragedy.

      ‘When did this happen?’

      ‘Two Christmases ago. He gambled, you see, and lost. At least when I sit at the tables, I win.’

      ‘What did he lose?’

      ‘Balmain, the Thornton family estate. I got it back for him by the luck of a full flush a week later and he was not thankful.’

      ‘The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.’

      ‘Words from the Bible?’

      ‘And from William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.’

      ‘You are a mine of information, Miss Smith. From witchery or just plain and constant reading?’

      ‘What do you think?’ She couldn’t add his title, not even if her life had depended on it, for here in the carriage there was a sort of equality that simmered between them and an energy that she had never felt with another.

      ‘I think you watch people and listen with your heart.’

      ‘You do that, too, my lord.’

      This time he only smiled.

      * * *

      Belle steeped medicines and pounded tinctures and she charged nothing to a hundred patients who could afford very little. She brought warm clothing and blankets for the babies and she found packs of cards and puzzles for those with time to while away at the very endings of their lives. She paid for shoes that were not scuffed to within an inch of their existence and found oranges and fish fresh from the stalls in the market on Whitechapel Road. She noted down everything, every small and tiny charge, and sent the Earl of Thornton her reckoning two days before she was due to visit next.

      Within an hour she had a message back.

       That’s the best ten pounds I have ever spent.

      She was pleased for such an assurance. His handwriting was strong and flowing, the b’s and p’s were fluted in a way that made her smile. She brought the paper to her nose and breathed in, the scent of ink the only thing discernible.

      What had she wanted it to smell like? Him?

      Swallowing, she placed the note down carefully on her desk and crossed to the mirror, peering at herself once she was there.

      She was not beautiful, nor perhaps even mildly pretty. Her hair was unremarkable and she had a tooth that did not sit at the same angle as the others. Her eyes were also far too blue to be restful.

      She spoke well, she read widely and she helped others. These were her attributes. Searching her mind, she probed for the other distant truth that lay hidden well away from sense.

      She wanted the Earl to like her. With more than respect. More than esteem. She was enough of a woman to have read the books on filial love, and on lust and on sexual endeavour. She had devoured Fanny Hill by John Cleland and read the compendium of poetry by the Earl of Rochester, clandestinely, under her bed sheets at night. The novel Justine had come into her hands through a bookseller in London for whom she had made medicines and she knew the erotic works of the Greek poets Strato and Sappho. She was no prude even if she was still a virgin.

      But she was lonely.

      She was also thirty-one, almost destitute, nameless, without family, and СКАЧАТЬ