Ever His Bride (47 page)

“Fine.” He continued adding documents to the
sheaf, and she wanted to weep.

“You’ve never given me the chance to be
anything more than Miss Mayfield to you, a very temporary wife. I
never knew from one day to the next which name you felt me worthy
enough to wear. So I’m taking back my old name, once and for all,
and returning yours, worse for the wear it seems, but obviously the
best course for the both of us.”

His movements were aggravatingly
mechanical.

“Very well, Miss Mayf—”

“Hunter, you have to believe that I am
sorry—”

“Enough, Miss Mayfield.”

“No. You’ll hear me out. I’m sorry about your
position with Commission of Railways. I know how much that meant to
you, and I wouldn’t have taken that from you for the world.”

“But the truth is that you
have
taken
it.” He leafed through his papers, looking bored. “You and your
squandered benevolence.”

“Hunter Claybourne!” Felicity went to the
front of his desk, shamed to her soul at the change in him. “I’m
not going to apologize for my article. It was long past due. I plan
to investigate other apprentice schools, and write many more. I
will be ruthless in my criticism of men like Lord Meath. I have to
be a champion—for Giles and for Andy and Betts. And for you,
Hunter—”

“I don’t need your pity, Miss Mayfield.”

“I would never give you any, Hunter.”

His face was masked and deeply planed, the
shadowy man she had met at the Cobson’s sponging house. A stranger
who wanted for nothing, and needed no one, who could calmly sort
through a stack of documents while her stomach roiled and her
shoulders shook.

“You simply don’t understand the nature of
business, Miss Mayfield.”

“Then I don’t want to know.”

“In business there are carefully calibrated
balances—”

“Balances? The life of an innocent child
balanced against what? A penny? A pound? A railway? What possible
transaction can justify stealing Andy’s childhood from him? For
leaving wounds that never heal. You know yourself how they
fester—”

“Enough, madam! You will listen for once, and
then you will leave me!” He tossed the documents into his attaché.
“Cheap labor is the foundation of manufacturing, do you understand
me? And manufacturing is the foundation of this country—of this
century, and the one to come. Every extra ha’penny that is paid out
between the hide and the shoe seller raises the price of the shoe
by a factor of four and reduces the profit—”

“Profit? That’s your justification—”

“Yes, profit. It is no crime. No shame.” He
came around the desk as if he thought to intimidate her into
agreeing with him. “Cheap shoes make for affordable shoes, Miss
Mayfield. It’s the law of profits. Neither evil nor good, it’s just
a matter of profit—”

“Oh, curse you, Hunter, and all your
kind.”

“Are you so righteous, madam?” He grabbed her
hand and turned her palm toward him. “So blinded you can’t see the
blood on your own pristine hands?”

His own large hands were icy and huge. He
touched her ring, lingered there, and she prayed he wouldn’t take
it. Not her ring. Not yet. “Blood on
my
hands? There is
none!”

“Are you so certain?” He paused, then dropped
her hand abruptly. His eyes were colder than ever. “You pride
yourself on making winter coats for your miserable wretches. Well,
where the hell do you think the woolens come from?”

“A mill, of course.” Felicity backed away
from him toward the cold, tile-fronted heater. He was a storm about
to lay waste to a field of ripe clover.

“And have you ever seen the inside of a
woolen mill, Miss Mayfield?”

“No.” He’d backed her against the enamel
tiles, and now she was forced to crane her neck to see into his
face.

“No?” He raised an arrogant brow, and she
knew that he found great triumph in his truth. He growled and
pushed himself away, then went back to the window, lifting back the
heavy drape with his hand. “Well, I suggest you visit one next time
you’re trooping through the countryside. You’ll find it most
illuminating, but then you’ll have to swear off woolens and start
weaving your own cloth. Do visit a coal mine next, Miss Mayfield,
and you’ll freeze the next winter in your protest against those
shocking conditions. And the same holds true of the factories that
make your lovely ribbons and the pencils that you teach the beggars
to write with—”

“Stop it, Hunter! It won’t work. You can’t
hobble me with my own guilt. Not like you’ve done to yourself.” He
had never seemed so much a stranger, so much the coolly calculating
industrialist as he watched out the window, aloof from everything
and everybody. “I know that my garden is small, that its soil is
exhausted, and that I’m as insignificant as a drop of rain in the
ocean—but I will see that these few children grow and prosper. And
they will know compassion, Hunter, and love, and will reach out
gladly to those whose fortunes aren’t as bright as their own—”

“Good day, Miss Mayfield.” He dropped the
drape against the window and went back to his desk, presenting his
broad back to her.

How she ached for him, wanted to hold him one
last time. She had hurt him immeasurably. But he had put himself
past caring. She envied that in him, but refused to shrink from her
own grieving. To do that would be to deny that she loved him.

“You’re a good man, Hunter—far better than
you know. And I would state that fact, unreservedly, even if I
didn’t love you.”

She had never gotten the chance to tell him
about the baby; still wasn’t certain herself. He had promised his
support when the time came, and that’s when she would ask for it –
invoke Article Four if she had to. Not now, when her emotions were
raw and she might do or say something foolish in front of him. If
it were true, she would tell him months from now, when it might be
easier to meet his eyes again.

She gathered her courage and went to the
door, paused with her hand on the latch.

Hunter turned, knew that if he could watch
her leave, he could let her go.
Just let her go.

“Good-bye, Hunter.”

Then she was gone. Gone in her
sagging-brimmed bonnet and her ragged brown skirt, leaving her soft
fragrance to accuse him. Gone, at last.

He wanted to follow after her, but he was
cemented in place by his fears, and by his relief that she had
survived the long night, that she’d been standing here in his
office adorned in her rags and stinking of her orphans. He knew she
had spent the night at the school. He’d heard Branson wheel the
carriage into the darkness, and had been waiting for him when he
returned with the news. But he couldn’t tell her that.

His throat ached. He felt obscene and soiled
again. He closed his eyes but he could still see the hollow-eyed
children, could smell the stink of the workhouse on his skin.

She had made him see too clearly, had
absolved him with her charity, and then she’d convicted him for
it.

I don’t need you, Felicity.
He needed
the Claybourne Exchange, and nothing else.

Already bluntly worded notes had begun to
arrive from other men of Lord Meath’s rank and influence, asking
pointed questions about exposure and trust. How could they trust a
man who couldn’t control his own wife? How could he allow her to
traipse the countryside? How could he not condemn her?

How could she be so beautiful?

And now he’d been summoned to a swiftly
called meeting, deep in the bowels of the Bank of England. That
meeting was to be about him.

A question of his integrity. His honor.
Hunter Claybourne’s name held up to its finest scrutiny.

Whatever the cost, he was prepared to
pay.

Hunter descended the steps of the Claybourne
Exchange and crossed Cornhill Street on foot, and then
Threadneedle—shouldering his way past memories, shed of his years,
his reputation, and his tattered coat, too large and stolen from a
shopkeeper’s rack, but handsome. His pulse quickened with a
familiar exhilaration and the scent of success tainted by fear. He
had been the very best of pickpockets, distracting his quarry with
a nudge, then a feint; risking little to chance because he’d known,
even then, what was at stake.

Now he stood on Threadneedle Street staring
up at the Bank, feeling exposed and raw.

“Come to face the music, Claybourne?”

Hunter swung around, half-expecting to find a
damp-faced magistrate bearing down on him. The urge to bolt into
the afternoon throng dissipated slowly, and left a searing hole in
his chest.

It was Meath, alighting from his carriage,
and an impulse came over Hunter to lift the man’s wallet. His
fingertips itched with a long-dormant memory of a proud young man
and his determination to prosper, but he turned his back on
Threadneedle and started up the lofty steps of the Bank.

“Come, Meath. You don’t want to be late for
the bloody spectacle.”

“This is a catastrophe, Claybourne! When a
man of Lord Meath’s stature is jeopardized by such scandal, so is
each one of us in this chamber. Mark me, you will pay for this!”
Lanford sat at the distant end of the polished table, presiding
over the council like a king over his court. Meath sat beside him,
bending the man’s ear in a hissing whisper.

Hunter steadied his anger and looked around
at the sea of granite faces glaring back at him from their
overstuffed, high-backed chairs. He was disgusted with himself and
with this unholy commerce. But he stood steadfastly, refusing to
buckle under their pressure. He had made the fortunes of half the
men in this chamber, and could unmake them with a flick of his pen.
But such a reprisal wouldn’t serve his own fortune—and that was the
purpose of his life.

“Well, say something, Claybourne!” Meath
bellowed as he leaned forward on his elbows. “You saw the
Times
this morning.”

The headline had been impossible to miss.
“‘Slop-shop Scandal.’ Yes, I saw it, Meath.”

“And, sir?” Lanford sat forward, too, his
thick fingers wrapped around the handle of his gavel.

“And, as usual,” Hunter said, evenly, “the
press have got hold of a stinking bone and they will shake it until
another comes along to distract them.”

Meath jumped to his feet and pointed at
Hunter. “It is
my
ankle they have hold of, Claybourne. Not
yours. And all because of your wife’s outrageous slander.”

His wife.
Felicity.
His ruthless
champion. Hunter could feel her hand in his even now, her lips upon
his brow, urging him to be brave, to find the best way. His heart
began to pound, and he unclenched his fist to rid himself of her
memory.

“Slander, my lord Meath, implies the
spreading of falsehoods. I’ll grant the woman’s impulses were
foolish, and she has paid dearly for them, but she reported the
facts as they stand.”

The chamber roared to life then; the truth
set free of its hive to sting wherever it found a home. Nearly
every man here was guilty of the same kind of legal immorality as
Meath, yet each now denied it with a righteous fury. Lanford banged
his gavel repeatedly on the table.

And Meath was shouting over it all, “Facts
without proof, Claybourne!”

“Without proof?” Hunter stalked toward Meath,
stood over the man and his sweat-smeared spectacles as the chamber
grew still. Bile rose into his throat. “Perhaps we should adjourn
from these chambers to meet in your apprentice school, Meath; to
see the crooked-limbed children for ourselves. Would their sunken
cheeks and broken fingers serve as proof enough?”

“Enough, Claybourne!” Lanford said.

“And you, Lanford, ought to look to your own
woolen mills. What sort of foulness would the
Times
discover
at the Broadworks, I wonder?”

“Are you threatening me, Claybourne?”
Lanford’s veined jowls shook.

“I’m trying to save our collective hides.”
Hunter stilled the quaking in his hands and opened his attaché.
“And if you cannot recognize that, if you persist in trying to
destroy me, then you can take your business elsewhere. As it is, I
see two dozen stubborn men whose grand plan is to crawl into a
stinking hole, and pull the dirt down on top of them. Is that what
all of you want? Do you want your critics to win?”

Hunter scanned the faces at the table; each
had gone damply crimson, or had paled to chalk. Lords and Commons,
members of the Privy Council, and the Board of Trade—each and every
man squirming in their seats. Cowards.

Sir John Eagan rose on his gouty legs, and
every eye turned to the man. “What do you suggest we do, Mr.
Claybourne?”

Hunter tasted the first stirrings of triumph,
and a dizzying brush with his past: Sir John sat on the Queen’s
Bench—a strict magistrate, and a name Hunter remembered from his
youth. If the man knew whose help he was requesting—

Hunter scrubbed that terror from his
thoughts. He would walk from this chamber the same man who entered;
no one would know of the street urchin that still lived inside him.
“First of all, Sir John, we must all agree that there is great
profit to be had in cheap labor.”

They grumbled their ascent as a body, Meath
among them, hunkered over a glass of brandy.

“And,” Hunter continued, knowing his next
statement would rankle, “that we are a contemptible breed.”

The grumbling rose and then fell back on
itself as Sir John sat down quietly. “Go on, Mr. Claybourne.”

Hunter knew he was dancing dangerously on the
edge of a very sharp blade. He turned and felt every eye on his
back as he went to the window that looked down onto Threadneedle
Street.

“We are the power in England. Financiers,
industrialists, demigods. We lay the railways and telegraph wire,
erect the factories; we tear down unprofitable rookeries to rebuild
and collect higher rents; and we do it all on the backs of people
who live and who work under the most appalling conditions—”