Ever His Bride (37 page)

Felicity thought she’d reached that last
great height, but she felt him stiffen and thicken inside her,
heard his sharp intake of air, and then he was pouring something of
himself into her, something hot and thick, something that filled
her with languor even as it boiled her skin. She slipped up and
over another cloud, called out to him one last time, then came
floating downward, spiraling and weary, slick with his sweat and
hers, her nostrils sharp with a new and heady fragrance.

He brushed her lips with his and smiled
lazily. “Not hours, I’m afraid.” His ragged breathing seemed to
keep him from saying more. Her own breathing wasn’t much easier,
but she hadn’t been laboring like a stallion as he had been. “Next
time, my sweet, I’ll try to hold back.”

“Yes, next time, Hunter.” She had never seen
his gaze so very genuine and smiled.

Next time.
He would hold her like this
again, another time, another day. This sweetness wouldn’t be their
last; perhaps he was learning. He was still buried inside her,
still large and ultimately intriguing, and they were swathed in
dampness.

“Oh, God.” His eyes were glazed and watery,
and held his weight above her, on arms that quaked. “You are
beautiful, Felicity Claybourne.”

She couldn’t remember him ever saying her
name with his own attached, certainly never without his scorn. She
kept it in her heart, to save and examine whenever her doubts might
surface.

Whatever happened, they were married now—
really and truly married.

And perhaps now she could start counting
forward from the day they were married, instead of backward from a
year.

“I
ain’t about to
read no books for babies, miss!”

Giles slapped the storybook onto the table
and stuffed his fists into his pockets.

“Very well, Giles.” Felicity refused to
coddle the boy in his prideful tantrums, especially with all the
other children looking on. They adored him, worshiped him, and she
wouldn’t have them picking up the worst of his habits. “If you
don’t know how to read—”

“You know damn well I can read this baby
stuff!” His cheeks flamed like cherries when he was angry. “I just
don’t want to! I got things to do.”

And she was pretty well sure he meant to do
them in Threadneedle Street.

“I’ve only asked you to read aloud to the
others. They so like to hear you. And the job pays three pence, for
a half-hour of your precious time. Where else can you find that
kind of work—guaranteed?”

Andy wrapped his arm around Giles’s waist.
“Read to us, Giles. Please!”

“‘N’ read like a pirate!” Jonathan said,
cuffing Giles in the arm. “Growl up your voice like ya do!”

Felicity smiled at Giles across the heads of
his admirers. He narrowed his eyes at her and frowned.

“All right, miss. But I’ll have my pay in
advance.” He stuck out his grimy hand and she wondered if she would
ever get him into a bath again. He’d looked so clean when they left
Blenwick. But at least now Giles had become a regular here at the
Beggar’s Academy, and it made her proud, relieved that he was
eating well, wearing boots with solid soles.

“I pay when the job is done, Mr. Pepperpot,
per our usual agreement.”

He fixed her with a stare, then reeled in his
hand. “Fair ‘nuff.”

The children cheered, but he was still
frowning as they drew him to the front of the schoolroom.

Their clothes were cleaner now, their faces
shining and filling out. She’d had the walls whitewashed and
chinked, had provided adequate food, found a sturdy worktable, and
assisted Gran in developing and running a more rigid program of
learning. But every week, twenty or more new children asked for
help and had to be turned away for lack of space. Short of a
miracle, all she could do was care for the lucky ones who fit
inside the small building.

Hunter had been wrong about her: if her
charity was truly self-serving, she’d have felt better at the end
of each day, instead of worse. As it was, she now worked longer
hours than ever, sometimes returning home after her husband, and
she had learned to beg castoffs from merchants in the name of the
Beggar’s Academy.

Dear Hunter. The thought of him always made
her heart gallop. She hadn’t slept in her own bed since the night
he’d returned from his travels. And she awoke each morning, wrapped
in his embrace, and ever more certain that his heart was
changing—that after their first year together ended, another would
begin. And that they would have unending years to follow.

Their peace had lasted nearly three weeks.
The subject of the slums remained untouched between them; he
allowed her the time and a generous amount of money, and she never
took home the misery or the stench that he hated so much, but would
hail a private cab on Shoreditch and behind the closed shades she
would change out of her muddied boots and wrap them in oil cloth,
removed the frumpy overdress she wore to protect her clothes. She
would wash her face and hands with lavender water from the canteen
she carried, inspect her clothes and scrubbed off any hint of
Bethnal Green.

She never mentioned Betts or Andy, Giles and
least of all, the Beggars Academy. He knew nothing of her work
here, not even that the place existed. Not secrets that must be
hidden from him, but to ward off the shadows they would conjure
between them.

“What have we here, Mrs. Claybourne?” Gran
lifted her new spectacles and peered into one of the filthy wooden
barrels Felicity had uncovered during the whitewashing. The woman
lifted out an old book. “
Millstone’s Reader.”

Felicity laughed and reached in for more.
“You must not have opened those barrels in a long time.”

“And why would I? I’ve been here seventeen
years, and until last week, the pair were holding up our worktable,
even way back then. Could have been hiding the crown jewels and I’d
not have had a notion.”

“More like a feast for the bookworms! What a
sad waste.” Felicity blew a nest of mildewy paper-castings off the
bindings.

Gran snorted and fanned the air. “Can hardly
read the title through the green. Not much to save here.”

“You never know, Gran. Must be pictures to
salvage and—”

“I’ll leave you to your quest, dear. It’s
time I see to heating up our lunch.”

Felicity retrieved the rest of the books from
the barrel, then sat at the new table, leafing through the brittle
readers, feeling a bit melancholy as the edges of the pages broke
off between her fingers.

The students had written their names and the
dates on the inside covers, just below where ‘Beggar’s Academy’ had
been stamped in watery black ink. Most of the books had at least
five names, and the dates went back as far as twenty-five
years.

She wondered where these grown-up children
were right now—which ones had learned their reading and arithmetic,
and escaped the squalor of Bethnal Green. And she wondered which of
them still lived in these same twisted lanes; which had died too
young of the cholera or whooping cough.

So far, she had found little to save.
Refusing to give up, she flipped open another book.

And then her world went a little
topsy-turvy.

The inside cover was like all the others,
yellowed and faded, the edges worn to a roundness. Three different
untutored hands had scrawled signatures across the page, one below
the next—yet one name stood out, proud and defiant, the letters
every bit as bold as they were today.

HUNTER CLAYBOURNE, OCTOBER 1831.

“Hunter?” Her tears blurred his signature, as
if conspiring to hide the familiar hand from her.

But this couldn’t be right!

In 1831, Hunter would have been about eleven,
a young man sent off to boarding school, like all the other sons of
his social class. He’d said he hadn’t attended Eton or Harrow, but
surely he had been schooled at one of the other fine English seats
of learning; his father would have insisted on it.

This Hunter Claybourne couldn’t be hers.
Impossible.

But for this one indisputable truth, this
mildewed, pauper-schoolbook, with its telling signature wedged
between two other names, suddenly made everything she knew about
her husband fall into place: his illogical intolerance for the
wretched, the scars she’d felt on his feet, those on his knuckles,
his paralyzing panic at the workhouse, his disgust at the smell she
had brought home on her clothing . . .

Hunter had grown up in Bethnal Green. Dear
God, he’d been a child of poverty, not privilege!

The room around her had begun to reel.

“Are you all right, Felicity?” Gran was at
her elbow.

She snapped the book shut, raising a cloud of
musty mildew, and stood up. “I’m fine, Gran.”

“You’re as pale as these walls.”

She turned the fragile book in her hands.
Hunter’s book. He’d had no tutors in Latin, no frowning headmaster.
Yet he had succeeded beyond all possible expectations. How proud he
must be of all he had become! How proud she was for him!

“You’ve done too much today, Felicity, my
dear.” Gran was patting her hand again. “You haven’t rested for a
minute. Perhaps you should go home.”

“Yes. I think I will. My husband and I have a
dinner party tonight, at Lord and Lady Meath’s. I needed to leave
early anyway.” She faltered and leaned against the table.

Gran reached toward the book. “Here, then,
I’ll put this with the rest of—”

“No! Please.” Felicity hid the book behind
her, unwilling to share her secret, Hunter’s secret, with anyone.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bark. I just thought I’d keep a copy
of one of the old readers—just for reference.”

“Very well, dear.”

Giles met her at the door, a frown of worry
on his forehead. “Are you sick, Mrs. Claybourne?”

She wanted to hug him for asking, but only
smiled and slipped the book into the pocket of her shawl. “Just a
bit under the weather, Giles. I’ll be fine in the morning. You help
out Gran today in my place, won’t you?”

Giles nodded very seriously. “‘Pon my word,
miss. Won’t cost you a sou.”

Felicity accepted hugs from all the children
as they clung to her blousy muslin overdress, and finally ran out
into the noisome riot that pulsed just outside the peace of the
Beggar’s Academy. Even in the brightness of day, and in all the
commotion, everything was dampened in shades of gray and the fetid
drab of hopelessness.

But today, instead of closing off her nose to
the stench, and veiling her vision from the implacable indignities
of such poverty, she walked slowly and purposefully through the
byways of Bethnal Green, imagining the boy that Hunter had been,
trying to see the world as he had lived it.

A clever boy with large dreams would have
loathed the tumbled-down houses, the shuttered-up windows, the
rooms that darkened like rat holes off the doorways. Idleness was a
corruption to him, and he had met it first-hand here on the street
corners, in the gin-sodden eyes of bricklayers and bonemen. Wicked
commerce in the byways, selling flesh and stolen silver. Half-naked
children squalling at their mother’s milkless breasts. Had he slept
cold in alleyways; had his lips cracked with the untended fevers of
childhood? Had his soul been broken here?

If her Hunter had been the boy whose name was
scrawled in the schoolbook, he must have felt his life always and
forever falling in on itself.

And yet Hunter had raised himself out of it,
and walked away.

No wonder he’d never wanted to return.

“Ah, a good day to you, Mrs. Claybourne!”
Tilson brightened when she opened the door to Hunter’s outer
office.

Everything seemed so normal here, the mighty
hub of the Claybourne Exchange: enduring, efficient, making her
wonder why she had been compelled to visit. The name in the book
just couldn’t be the same Hunter Claybourne who gave his counsel to
the Bank of England, the man who had skillfully maneuvered her into
marrying him to gain another railway, and who now was poised to
take a lofty position on the Board of Trade.

Surely the Hunter Claybourne she had married
was born to this kind of financial intrigue. He was nurtured and
groomed for it. How else could he have learned his business with
such proficiency?

“You’re looking very well, Mrs.
Claybourne.”

“Thank you, Tilson. And how is your
wife?”

Tilson smiled fondly. “Oh, very happy. She
thanks you most kindly for the raisins and dried figs. A most
unexpected anniversary gift.”

“The gift is from both my husband and
me—”

“Yes, of course, of course. And you must be
here to see him. He’s inside, meeting with a panel of investors.
Very, very important. I don’t know how long he’ll be, or I’d—”

But the door to the office clicked open and
Hunter was standing in the doorway, handsome and roguish, and very
sure of himself. His half-smile harbored an intimacy that was so
abundantly apparent to Felicity that she could imagine him nuzzling
her breast.