In the Arms of a Marquess (26 page)

Ben held her regard. Lines fanned from the corners of her big eyes—eyes that had seen at least as much of the worst of the world as his.

“I wish to help,” he said.

She studied him for a moment, then pushed away from the bar and went through a door behind. She returned with a folded envelope and proffered it.

“Here it is, love. Don’t know what good it’ll do you. Just a mess of tears and loneliness.”

Ben’s breathing stalled. It must have cost the girl a considerable sum to send the missive, perhaps all the wages she had earned since her departure from London. The mark of origin on the envelope indicated Fort St. George. Madras.

He unfolded the single page and read the spindly lines. This was no clerk’s hand, nor a prostitute’s. The girl, Missy, could write.

Tears and loneliness, indeed. Her horrifying shipboard experience. And a name: Sheeble.

Ben folded the page, slipped it inside the envelope and handed it back to Lil. Crispin would pay for this. And Styles . . .

“How many girls went with Missy, Lil?”

Lil shrugged. “A few score, I ’spect.”

“Perhaps this Mr. Sheeble that Missy mentions will know.” The Mr. Sheeble who, when girls died from sickness that ran rampant aboard ship during the ocean voyage, cut off a lock of hair from each before casting the bodies overboard. To record his captain’s losses, according to Missy’s account.

Lil reached for Ben’s hand.

“You’re a clever one, love.” Her voice was uncustomarily thick. “D’you think they made my Missy into a tart like me after all? She didn’t say, so I think p’raps they did and she was too ashamed to tell old Lily.”

Ben curled his fingers around hers and squeezed. “If Missy is anything like you, Lil, then she is a finer person than most I know.”

She pulled away, sniffing.

“Lil?”

“Duck?”

“Why did seeing Lord Styles the other night remind you of Missy?”

Her eyes went flinty again, like that evening in Ben’s fogged memory when he had barely noticed anything outside of his mind and heart so wrapped around the woman who had come back into his life. Who had never left it, in truth.

“Before they went off, he came in here looking all spruced up like you now. Turning eyes down the street, making promises to everything in a skirt, including my Missy.” Her lips tightened. “He’s the one as got them girls to go.”

T
avy struggled against the lump in her throat and met Abha’s gaze. “Why did you bring me here?”

“Ask him.”

She took a deep breath and turned fully around once more. Marcus had donned a shirt and was drawing the door shut behind. A small hand arrested his action, becoming an arm then an entire slender body. Tavy’s breath escaped her slowly.

The girl was stunning—shining raven hair, ivory skin, wide deep eyes the color of evergreen leaves that matched her modest round gown. Only the barest hint of care-worn corners at her lips and on her brow revealed her mean origins. Nevertheless, she was most definitely a girl, not over seventeen. Tavy’s nostrils flared. She could not meet Marcus’s gaze.

“I am so pleased to meet you, Tabitha,” she said, “and so enormously glad to have this final justification for not marrying your protector.”

“Octavia—”

“Marcus, I really do not imagine there is anything you could say that would alter my opinion of this situation. Nevertheless, I must ask you for the particulars, however distasteful I suspect I will find them. You see, I trust Abha with rather more than my life, and he seems to have thought it important for me not only to know you have a mistress, but also why.” She pressed her palms to her burning cheeks.

“Will she reveal us, Marcus?” The girl lifted an angel’s gaze, filled with devotion. She shifted it to Tavy and whispered, “Please, miss, do not tell him.”

“I daresay I should be affronted that there seems to be someone else to whom you would not wish this—” Tavy gestured about her. “—situation to be revealed.”

“Octavia, I cannot beg your pardon enough.”

“Do not beg anything, Marcus. Just tell me about the blackmailer.”

“She knows Mr. Sheeble?” The girl clutched Marcus’s arm, and real fear shone in her gorgeous eyes.

“Tabitha, I must speak with this lady alone.” He disentangled her lily fingers and urged her back into the bedchamber. “I will be with you again shortly,” he added softly.

The girl’s gaze eased with a look of such honest affection, Tavy’s breath caught. Marcus patted her hand and shut the door behind her.

“Allow me to don more fitting—”

“That will not be necessary,” Tavy said hastily. “I have already seen quite a bit more than your feet, so the cow is already out of the barn, as it were. And frankly I do not wish to be here any longer than absolutely necessary.”

He frowned. “What do you wish to know?”

“Who is Sheeble?”

“A sailor and thief. As I told you before, his business is in dirty cargo which he seeks to sell at great profit.”

“What is this girl to him?”

His gaze skittered away.

“Marcus?”

Face stiff, he uttered, “His insurance.”

“I do not know why the men of my acquaintance should be so fond today of speaking in riddles,” Tavy said with an understated sigh.

“He has threatened to send her where he sends the others if I do not assist him as I have before. He insists that I continue to do his bidding whenever he wishes.”

Tavy’s stomach clenched. “The others?”

“Girls. English girls.”

“Where does he send them, Marcus?”

“To the East Indies. Where else?”

Abha’s soft shoes shifted upon the floor.

“You are aiding a man who sells English girls into prostitution so that you can retain hold of your own?” Tavy could not mask her disgust.

A spark lit in Marcus’s eyes. “They are intended as wives for English soldiers and minor Company officials, so that the men will not resort to taking native brides. But—” He halted.

“But?”

He shook his head, his mouth an implacable line.

“You will not tell me more, I see, so I can only imagine the worst.” Tavy folded her trembling hands. “Marcus, was I or my family ever in danger?”

He hesitated, then shook his head.

“Well then, I am sorry for you.” She turned, and this time Abha stepped aside to allow her passage.

“She is not what you believe,” Marcus said in a low voice. “I am not.”

A dull ache lodged in Tavy’s chest. Who was she to throw stones at him for loving the wrong person, or at the girl for imagining in him her rescuer? At Tabitha’s age, she had done the same.

“No. I can see that,” she said quietly. “Why don’t you take her to safety? To the countryside?”

“Her mother and young sisters are here. She will not leave them.”

“Even to be a lord’s mistress with a house of her own?”

He nodded.

“Then you are fortunate to have met with such a loyal heart, I think.”

Marcus’s brow drew down. Tavy walked out of the flat. At the carriage, she finally met Abha’s gaze.

“I am still not certain why you did this. I am both grateful and angry with you for it. But I wanted to know the truth, so I have no one to blame but myself. Still, I feel rather peculiar and think it would be best if we did not see each other again today.”

He bowed and stepped back.

When Tavy reached home, she went to her bedchamber and instructed her maid that if asked, she was to say that her mistress had a megrim. She did have one, in any case, as well as a horrible suspicion as to the reason she had made a project of Marcus’s blackmailer weeks earlier.

A knock came at the door and it opened.

“Octavia?” Alethea queried in a voice far too lively for Tavy’s confused state at the present. “Lady Fitzwarren has arrived and— Oh, goodness, your face! What has happened?”

“Thank you, sister.” Tavy returned to the view of the bright autumn day through the windowpane. “The next time I wish praise for my appearance, I shall certainly come to you.”

“But you have been crying.”

Tavy rubbed at the moisture on her cheek. “Have I?”

Alethea moved across the chamber and smoothed her hand along Tavy’s arm.

“Lady Fitzwarren has come for luncheon as planned, but something is amiss and you have forgotten that, haven’t you? I will tell her you are indisposed.”

“No.” Tavy sniffed forcefully, blinked away tears, and headed for the door. “Company will be just the thing to wrest me from my blue devils.”

When Tavy entered the parlor, Lady Fitzwarren’s face opened in a look of perfect awareness, proving Tavy’s instinct horridly wrong. The dowager moved with rustling haste to grip her hands.

“What has he done?” she demanded.

“Oh, well.” The tears prickled again, and she gulped them back. “It seems he has taken a mistress—a mere child, but a remarkably beautiful one—and is being blackmailed by a very bad man through this girl. He is obviously quite in love with her, however, and she with him. So who is to fault either of them?” she finished with an airy wave of her hand.

“Not D—” The dowager’s fleshy lips snapped shut. “No, of course not.” She dropped Tavy’s hands and tilted back on her heels. “Then why are you crying, silly child?”

“Because I have just been thinking some tremendously uncomfortable thoughts and I am not quite certain how to proceed now.”

“First things first. Have you broken off the engagement?”

“Well, yes. Of course.”

“Oh, thank heavens,” Alethea said upon a sizable exhalation, and sank against a chair.

“Yes, let us all sit and talk this through,” the dowager said. “Your sister and I are consumed with relief and consequently somewhat shaken, so you must pour out the tea, Octavia.”

Tavy obeyed, and since the activity prevented her from chewing on her fingertips she was grateful for it. When she finished she could not be still. She went to the window, needing to look out. Always, outward.

“I think I accepted Marcus, or rather even considered accepting him, because I somehow knew he loved someone else.”

Neither of the other women spoke immediately. Then Alethea asked softly, “You do not wish for a love match, after all?”

“She does not believe she deserves one,” Lady Fitzwarren stated.

“Whyever not?” Alethea sounded affronted.

“Because your mother is a selfish, airheaded widgeon. And your father, a kind but weak man, never had any idea what to do with a daughter as spirited as Octavia. To have sent her away to live with that cold woman and stick-brained man in the very prime of her young womanhood was a thorough travesty, I always said.”

“You said that? To whom?”

“To them!”

Tavy turned away from the view. “You know, this is all very interesting, naturally, given that you are speaking of me, but I am still here in the room.”

“Have I said anything with which you disagree?” the dowager demanded.

“No. Mama and Papa did not sympathize with my character in the least. I was terribly awkward, not at all pretty, and too plainspoken. I hadn’t any of your feminine graces, Thea, and I loved all the wrong things, like sea travel and adventure and India. As girls on the verge of their introduction into society go, I was a complete disaster. But he saw something in me that he liked, nevertheless.”

“Not Marcus Crispin?”

“Octavia Pierce, for a young lady of impeccable honesty you have been wretchedly deceptive.”

“Well, I don’t know why I should have told anyone anything about it. I have always been traveling in some way or another, in my imagination even before I left England, dreaming of adventures, not content living within myself. Marcus seemed the perfect solution for continuing to live in that manner. He would not have asked anything of me that I would have found difficult to provide. And he never would have left me because he never would have given himself to me in the first place.”

“Left you?” Alethea whispered.

Tavy met Lady Fitzwarren’s gaze. Tears quivered on the rims of the dowager’s baggy orbs.

“I am deceptive, Aunt Mellicent, to myself most of all.”

The dowager nodded. “How do you feel now, child?” she said without a trace of sentimentality, despite the tears.

“Wretched.” Her stomach hurt, as well as her brain and heart, in a wholly new and desolate manner. “I think I must go now and write a note.” She crossed the chamber and returned to her bedchamber.

As she had requested, Abha was not to be found, and she still hadn’t the desire to see him. So she put the missive into a footman’s hands—a remarkably direct and open action that felt marvelously good—and waited.

After several hours, nerves strung, she asked the footman about his errand. He replied that he had given it to Lord Doreé’s first footman.

Tavy continued waiting. The day waned and Ben did not call or send a message. Perhaps she had been wrong about him. Perhaps she should have trusted her misgivings, as before.