The Secrets of a Courtesan. Nicola Cornick

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      “Very well,” she said, even more frostily. “Since you force my hand.”

      She pushed open the door of her shop and stepped from the bright sunlight into the cool, dusty shade feeling a strange sense of relief at least to be on her own property. She placed her marketing basket on the counter with a little sigh. In the windows the sale items gleamed in the sun; jewelry sending a shower of sparkling rainbow colors across the display, bone china pawned by the wife of a brewer who was so fond of his own ale that he had spent too much time drinking and too little working, bed linen from a cottager out on the road to Skipton, all manner of goods brought in by people desperate to raise a bit of ready cash. There was also a very fine brace of pistols that Eve suspected belonged to a man who had turned his hand, unsuccessfully, to highway robbery, and a dinner service that a local banker had brought in when his bank had gone bust and he had wanted to avoid his possessions being confiscated by his creditors. All the goods told their own stories, Eve thought, of people struggling in what was a hard economic climate.

      Joan, Eve’s assistant, came scurrying out of the back room, wiping her hands on her apron as she heard the ring of the doorbell. She was an older woman, a former servant at Fortune’s Hall, the local manor house and home to the squire, Sir Montague Fortune. She was the only person in whom Eve had confided her past and Eve valued her friendship highly.

      “I did not realize you were back, madam—” Joan broke off as she saw Rowarth, and her sharp brown gaze swept over him, summing him up in one comprehensive glance. Her sandy eyebrows rose infinitesimally.

      “This gentleman and I,” Eve said carefully, “have business to discuss. Could you take over here please, Joan?”

      “Business, is it?” Joan said tartly. “I thought you had finished with that sort of business, madam.”

      Eve smiled. She was accustomed to Joan’s sharp tongue and knew it hid a protective heart. Joan had been turned off for refusing Sir Montague Fortune’s advances and she had some hair-raising tales to tell of the goings-on at Fortune’s Hall. She also had no very good opinion of men.

      “Don’t fret,” Eve said. “I am done with it.”

      Ignoring Joan’s snort of disbelief she ushered her visitor behind the counter and through the doorway into the room at the back. The pawnbroker’s shop occupied two downstairs rooms in the stone-built terrace. Eve used one as the shop front and the other, a much larger room, as a combined office and a store for all the goods people brought in to pawn. Upstairs there was a tiny bedchamber and some even tinier living quarters. She and Joan clung to their financial independence by their fingertips. The premises were hardly sumptuous but the shop did at least provide an independent living and it had been a lifesaving opportunity for Eve when she had run from London—and from Rowarth—leaving everything behind, broken by a miscarriage, reeling from the news that she would never bear another child. She had left behind the beautiful little town house that Rowarth had given her in Birdcage Walk, where he had spent all his nights and most of his days with her, the clothes and the jewels, and had climbed on the first stagecoach from the Blue Boar Inn in High Holborn. She had told the driver she would go as far as her money could take her and had ended up in Fortune’s Folly, working as an assistant until she had accumulated sufficient savings to buy the shop, working her fingers to the bone, working, always working, as she tried to forget…

      She pushed the memories away. Rowarth was standing in her office and looking around him with a lively interest. He looked elegant and polished, the epitome of wealth and privilege, utterly out of place in these shabby surroundings. Never had the differences between them felt so stark.

      “So,” she said, a little ungraciously, “I can give you two minutes, Rowarth, no more. Whatever your business is with me, I do not want to discuss it.”

      His gaze came back to rest on her, dark, brooding, and she repressed a little shiver.

      “You will give me as long as I require,” he said. He straightened. “My business with you is this. I am here on behalf of the Home Secretary. You are under suspicion of criminal activity. If you do not help us we will ruin you. We will expose your true identity and we will take from you everything that you possess.” He smiled at her. “Now,” he said gently, “will you talk to me?”

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