After the Kiss

I
n London it was never truly quiet. The clatter of carriage wheels across the cobbles plucked a sleeper from the faraway world of dreams. The shouts of young rowdies, the calls of the barrow girls, a baby’s cry, they all acted as sentinel to the coming of a new day.

London was crowded of late. People had poured into the city from the countryside in order to board one of the innumerable ships that awaited them in the harbor. England, it seemed, was migrating. Even as she clung to the edge of wakefulness, Margaret Esterly envied the travelers their new beginnings.

Their bedchamber above the bookshop was small, the air close on this autumn dawn. Her hand stretched out, touched Jerome’s pillow. Where was her husband?

No doubt downstairs, seated at his desk, studying the ledgers by the light of the candle again. There was a look in his eyes lately, one that was not able to mask the concern there.

She rolled over on her back, threw her arm over her eyes.

There was nothing she could do. The bookshop was not doing well. For some reason their trade had fallen off in the past few months. Days would pass and the bell over the downstairs door would remain stubbornly silent.

Jerome had become more and more withdrawn, barely speaking to her. Nor were any of her suggestions met with any enthusiasm. He simply did not wish to discuss their problems or their uncertain future. Going to him now would only embarrass him. She had done so once before and he’d closed the ledgers and extinguished the candle and refused to speak of it.

She brushed her hand over her face. It trembled in the air, clutching at the smothering blackness. Nightmares loomed and she turned, restless, as if to avoid them.

She began to cough, the effort of it pulling her into full wakefulness. Opening her eyes, she looked about her and felt a surge of fear. The cloud was not a dream, but smoke.

Jerome. Where was Jerome?

She stood, intent on reaching the door. It was only a few feet to her left, but it seemed much farther in the blinding smoke. Grabbing the latch, she pulled the door ajar. Flames spread upward from the staircase, pooled across the floor. The fire obliterated the hallway as she watched, panicked.

“Jerome!” From somewhere below came the sound of a window shattering. “Jerome!” The floor shuddered as if the building itself cringed. But there was no answering voice in the fire’s fury.

Margaret pushed the door shut as the flames licked up the wall. There was no escape down the staircase. Dropping to her knees in order to breathe through the billowing clouds of inky smoke she crawled on hands and knees to the tiny room adjoining the bedchamber.

Once there, she lay still for a moment, her face pressed against the warm floor. Her eyes smarted, her lungs felt as if they were coated with grime.

The maid slept in this tiny anteroom. She called out, but Penelope didn’t answer. She reached the cot and shook the girl’s shoulder. No response. She shook her harder, her fingers moving to Penelope’s face, her palms slapping the young girl’s cheeks.

The fire had a voice of its own. One that roared and deafened the air even as it colored it black. She screamed in Penelope’s ear, her shouts in tandem with a silent and fervent prayer.

Please let Jerome be safe. Please.

Penelope began to cough. One reassurance, at least.

A moment later the two women crawled to the lone window, a wide gray square mounted high in the wall and blessedly still visible in the smoke. Together they pushed the candlestand directly below it. Margaret moved back and helped Penelope mount the small table. The maid could, by reaching up only about a foot, grasp the sill and pull herself to safety.

Margaret had stopped coughing in the last few moments. Only now it felt as if a band were being pulled tightly around her throat.

Penelope disappeared through the window.

The air was so thick it felt as if it were a solid thing. The boards beneath her feet felt as if they were on fire, as if the flames sought her out even in the darkness.

Someone called out to Penelope, and Margaret heard the girl’s shout in response. A blessing, then, that she was safe. Perhaps Jerome, too, had been able to escape from the burning building and waited for her below.

In mounting the candlestand, she stubbed her toe upon the small chest that served as their strongbox. She picked it up and pushed it through the window, just before following. On the other side of the window she fell a few feet, even as her hands scrabbled against the side of the building for a handhold. The fire flared up at her from a downstairs window, singeing her feet. Eager hands reached out and pulled her to safety. Someone shouted, then slapped at the burning hem of her nightrail, lowering her to safety.

Once on the ground, she lay there for a moment, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. Small aches were beginning to make themselves known, the abrasions on her hands, the scrape on her elbow, her feet smarted: she was surprised to see how red and blistered they appeared when she blinked open her eyes.

As she watched in horror, the upper floor of the bookshop crumbled into the center of the building. Moments. They had been only moments from death.

“Jerome?” She stood and looked around her. A cape was laid across her shoulders.

She pushed through the crowd. “Jerome? Have you seen him? My husband? Jerome?” She pulled on sleeves, grabbed arms, but no one answered her. One by one, the men who fought the fire lowered their eyes. Her neighbors looked away, or down at the ground. All except her friends, the Plodgetts. Maude was crying, while Samuel slowly shook his head from
side to side, his expression revealing both his sadness and the truth.

Jerome did not emerge from the crowd. He didn’t stretch out his hands to grip hers nor reassure her with a smile. People began to move back, as if to give her room to grieve. Margaret turned and stood looking at the burning building in shock.

The fire had a voracious appetite, devouring all of Jerome’s precious books, the rare editions, the treasured volumes. The buckets of water thrown at the blaze succeeded only in containing it, not in lessening its destruction. As she stared, the back of the building fell, sending soot and cinders into the air. A last wall of books caught fire, a monument to Jerome’s love of antiquity, of Roman poets and Greek philosophers.

“Come away, Miss Margaret,” Penelope was saying. The maid placed her arm around Margaret’s shoulders.

She glanced at Penelope dully. The girl’s cheeks were bright red, her brown hair askew. Beneath her borrowed wrapper her nightrail was coated with soot.

Margaret shook herself free, remained staring at the pyre.

A fiery grave.

Behind her people whispered. She could hear the drone of speech.
Tragedy
and
horror
were uttered side by side with the words
blessing
and
fortunate
. She stood in her nightrail, and a borrowed cape waiting for Jerome to appear, but knowing with a sickening sense of disbelief that he never would. He had died in the fire. How could that be a blessing? How could she possibly be considered fortunate?

Words had been stripped from her. There were only the smoldering timbers and the stench of paper and leather and gilt reduced to embers. A sense of unre
ality overtook her, as if this moment were not quite true. Soon she would awaken from this odd and unsettling dream.

But it wasn’t a dream. Pink clouds as delicate as feathers streaked across a blue sky. Dawn had come to London.

The fire flared, a final greedy lick of fiery lips in appreciation for the banquet it had consumed. A triumphant, glittery smile to mock her sudden and unexpected widowhood.

Jerome.

She began to cry, the tears soundless and painful.

“It is done, Your Grace.”

Alan Stilton, Duke of Tarrant, studied the man standing in front of him.

His library was a room designed to display his treasures, magnificent paintings by Rubens, a fresco in the style of Giorgione, cabinets of mahogany and glass filled with those books that interested him.

Peter defiled the room with his presence. An ugly man, he’d been rendered even more unacceptable by the addition of a long red gouge down one cheek.

So, Jerome had fought back.

Peter, a former boxer, was employed ostensibly as his coachman. In actuality, he served in many guises. His giant size and misshapen face led him to be viewed with some caution by the other staff.

He’d hired the man nearly a decade ago after witnessing Peter fight an opponent nearly to the death. The zeal he’d displayed even when obviously losing had impressed him. The desperation it had revealed had intrigued Tarrant even more. He’d hired him and never regretted the decision. Peter possessed one underestimated value—he was fanatically loyal.

“He is dead?” Tarrant asked, gazing at the surface of his desk. He moved a gold inkwell to the left, smoothed his hand over the letter from his factor. Inconsequential acts to mask the degree of his interest in Peter’s answer.

“Yes, Your Grace,” Peter said respectfully.

“And the books?” Tarrant glanced up at him.

“They could not be found,” the servant said, ducking his head as if ashamed. A curious act, one of a penitent. Or a man who knew his place in life.

Tarrant nodded, thinking that he should no doubt consider himself one of the damned this day. A demon. He had ordered the murder of his brother and stood listening to the proof of his deed. How odd that he did not feel a shred of remorse for it.

He stood, walked to window, intent on the view in front of him. It would not do for Peter to know how much the loss of the
Journals
bothered him. They were the only proof, a legacy to be hoarded and guarded through the coming decades.

“And the bookshop?”

“It is nothing but cinders, Your Grace.”

An option if the books could not be found.

“And the woman? Margaret?” His stomach clenched as he spoke her name. An irritant, his bastard brother’s wife.

“She survived the fire, Your Grace. I waited and watched.”

A pity, that.

He raised his hand, wiggled his fingers, an effortless dismissal. Peter did not need the words. In moments, Tarrant heard the door shut quietly behind him.

The view from this room was of a quiet square. A nest of green flanked by townhouses. A prestigious
address, a street occupied by earls and a duke or two. He preferred Wickhampton to London, but this house served him well enough.

At the moment, he didn’t see the row of trees and the iron gate, or the crushed stone walk that led artfully through the small park. Instead, he was fifteen years old again, and being told of his father’s indiscretion.

“You have a brother, Alan.”

“Sir?”

His father’s face with its hawk-nosed and jutting chin had simply stared like a marble bust back at him. “Do you question my words or the existence of the boy?”

“Neither, sir,” he said, cautious as he had always been by his father’s anger.

“He is but a few months younger than you, Alan,” his father had announced. As if pleased by the sign of his masculine prowess. To breed two sons within months of each other seemed to him to be a great feat. It had merely been distasteful to Alan. “I have made provisions for him in my will, and wish you to administer his funds.”

He had smiled, Alan remembered. Some faint agreement. An expression that quite adequately had hidden his true thoughts.

His father had wanted him to welcome a half-brother and pretend that the by-blow was at least the equal of him. He had done so, for twelve years. The moment his father had died he had taken on the mantle of responsibility, forcing down the rage he’d felt along with the disgust. For twelve years he had been exactly what his father would have wished, a steward to the bastard, born because of a relationship between a maid and a duke.

Until today.

He studied the leaden gray sky and wondered why the sun was not shining brightly. It was a brilliant day. He was, finally, free. Not only from Jerome’s eternally affable and grating nature, but his father’s shade, whispering in his ear the indefinable truth. The old man had always felt more fondness for his bastard than for his rightful heir.

Alan was, suddenly, almost rapturously happy. The
Journals
had been destroyed, but all was not completely lost. He would never again be bothered with Jerome. Or his wife, Margaret.

The Duke of Tarrant smiled.

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