It Happened One Midnight (PG8) (27 page)

It was faintly acerbic.

“Not as a matter of course, no,” he told her after a moment.

“So it’s a bit much for you to take in, I imagine.”

He said nothing for a time. Just long enough for her to hear the faint whiff of self-righteousness in her own tone. Just long enough for the silence to become a whispered rebuke.

“I don’t like picturing you in shackles. No,” he said evenly. Quietly.

His hands were cold; his face felt stiff. He suspected all the blood had left it.

They stared at each other a moment as the benign country rolled by. They still weren’t being followed by hounds or villagers with torches and pitchforks or anything at all, really. How easy it had been to steal a child.

A child that nobody wanted. Disposable as kindling.

Just like Tommy had been.

“Jonathan . . .” she said softly, suddenly. She leaned forward impulsively. And she laid her hand softly on his knee. She was offering comfort for what he had to picture now. And she knew how to give comfort and solace, in large part because of what she’d endured.

He drew in a breath, and sighed it out. And then he gave a short nod.

She gently took her hand away.

By rights they ought to be in each other’s arms, and his hands ought to be sliding beneath her skirts.

She sat back again. That wouldn’t be happening. They were
friends
.

“How did you go from that—” He gestured with an appreciative sweeping hand at her person. “—to this?”

“The exceptional representative of womankind I am today? Well, I was shackled after the first time I ran, for they caught me. I was eight years old. But they didn’t catch me the second time. I got away.”

“How?”

“I’d diligently sharpened a twig that I found in the yard and hid it in the seam of my skirt. Little by little, against the rail of my cot. So they chained me up and the whole while I was chained I was sweet as candied ginger and docile and even pious whilst shackled—I really had learned the error of my ways! It really had been what was best for me! That sort of thing. They were
enchanted
. And after that pig of a foreman unshackled me with a great deal of blather about seeing the error of my ways, I waited for just the right moment. When no one was looking. And I stabbed him.”

Jonathan was both horrified and enthralled by the story.

“Dead?”

“Probably not,” she said indifferently. “I stabbed him in the thigh, which was as high as I could reach. Unless somehow a splinter found its way into him and he died a slow painful death from infection.” She seemed to brighten a little at the possibility. “He screamed like a little girl and
I
ran like a spider out of that place. I remember hands grabbing at me; they missed. I knew the area now, and even though they sent out dogs, it was much too late. I kept to the river. They never saw me again. It took some doing but I returned to London—it’s about a day’s walking, and the roads are marked. I did have friends to look after me, after a fashion, and I knew where to find them—in the very building where I live today. I ran a bit wild, living from hand to mouth, on scraps I could steal, and on what charity was extended to me.”

“And yet you don’t sound as though you were raised in the gutter.”

“Well, I wasn’t. Not entirely. My mother once did the Countess of Mirabeau a good turn, and she’d wanted to return the favor. When she learned of were I was living, she got hold of me, made certain I acquired some polish, the sort of polish my mother had tried to impart, and a little education. I loved to read, and she found a few books for me. She’d like to see me settled, I know. But I think she has in mind for me a life like my mother’s.”

The unspoken words being, “But it’s not what I want.” He recalled her vision of a little girl running into the arms of a man at a town house.

“So the celebrated Tommy de Ballesteros is in truth a fugitive from justice.”

“They called me Thomasina Bell, back then. And yes, I suppose I am. Are you going to turn me over to the authorities?”

“I might, if you force me to accompany you on any more jaunts like this one.”

She laughed at that, knowing he was lying.

But he didn’t say anything else.

“It’s all the same, isn’t it?’ she mused. “If you’re a mill owner and you’ve enough money, you can buy children by the handful from the workhouses. Society has to do
something
with them, so why not put them to practical use?” It was all said very sardonically. “I was promised I would learn to be a fine lady there, and I was bid to sign a paper and given a shilling to seal the bargain. And the so-called bargain gave them the right to me until I reached the age of twenty-one. And I was eight years old when I made that decision.”

The thought of it was unbearable.

“It’s wrong.” His voice sounded gruff, abstracted in his own ears. Such pallid words. He wanted to unsay them the moment he’d said them. “There are laws . . .”

“But they aren’t sufficient, and they aren’t enforced well enough. What are you going to do about it, Jonathan? Destroy every mill?”

“Perhaps.”

She quirked the corner of her mouth humorlessly.

“It’s the sort of thing a man like the Duke of Greyfolk can influence,” she said. “He could
help
make laws. He has that sort of power and wealth and position. Someone needs to make it
stop
.” Her voice was quiet but fierce.

He noticed then she was gripping the bloody medal again. A good luck charm?

He thought he’d better tell her.

“Tommy . . . that mill is for sale, and The Duke of Greyfolk wants to buy it. As does my father. But the solicitor has the final say over who purchases it, and he seems to have decision-making criteria known only to him. So now my father is trying to woo the duke into the Mercury Club Investment Group, I suppose because their combined wealth and influence couldn’t help but sway a lowly solicitor,” Jonathan concluded dryly.

Tommy took this in thoughtfully. “Jonathan . . . you and I can only help one child at a time. But someone like the duke . . . with his power and name and money . . . oh, Jonathan. Just imagine. What if . . . what if I told him about what became of my mother, and what became of me . . .
surely
he’d listen. It would be unconscionable not to see him. It’s time to stop being a coward.” She glanced down at her medal.

God, how he hated the words, “you and I can only help one child at a time.” How he chafed at his limitations, and youth, and how his ambitions were so hobbled by his resources. He could protect her from sinister doctors or from drowning in the Ouse. But he hadn’t the power to change the whole world for her, and people like the duke and his father . . . almost certainly did.

And likely wouldn’t.

“You’re the bravest person I’ve ever met,” he said with low ferocity.

Her eyes went wide at that, and then she smiled, a beautiful flush of pink entering her cheeks. And she turned away, abashed a moment, considering herself in this new light.

“And if you do go speak to the duke . . . I hope the meeting is everything you want it to be.”

“I’ll go tomorrow,” she said quietly. He saw her knuckles tighten to whiteness over the medal.

Next to Tommy, Charlie muttered in his sleep, rolled over, and farted.

Jonathan sighed. “Did you have to rescue such a determinedly fetid one?”

“I’m sure
you
always smell like starch and soap and bay rum.”

It startled both of them into a moment of awkward silence, the sudden inventory of how he smelled.

“You left out, ‘and a certain ineffable manly goodness native only to you.’ ”

She rolled her eyes. But he saw the blush at her collarbone.

He was on her mind. Right there at the surface. Of course he was. For she was on his. More specifically, he lingered in her senses. And in all likelihood, at night, when it was dark and they were alone in their respective beds, she thought about how he smelled, and how his hair felt against her hands, and the cognac and satin—
cognac and satin!
—taste of his mouth. Because he knew he relived again the feel of her skin, the silken slide and give of it beneath his palms, and the way her body fit against his, how lithe she was, how wild and alive and hungry she was when he touched her. He hadn’t touched enough of her, not anywhere outside his imagination, anyway.

And he didn’t know about her, but he knew what
he
did while he was thinking of her at night.

When really, he ought to be counting blond heiresses instead of sheep in preparation for choosing one.

The silence between them was different now. Both more peaceful and less. He realized this secret of her scars, that unspoken part of her history, had created a subtle tension between them.

The remaining tension had to do with how he smelled, and how she
knew
how he smelled, and all the associated unspoken things. But they weren’t going to discuss that.

Because they were
friends
.

“Jonathan . . . I know it’s new to you, and difficult to hear. But everything that happened to me was such a very long time ago now that it’s almost like a dream to me. And it’s a blessing, really, in many ways. Because of it I’m no longer really afraid of anything, that there’s very little I can’t do, and that I’ll do whatever I need to do in order to get what I want.”

Her smile was serene. Her spine straight.

Jonathan stared back at her and realized: She believes it. She actually believes it.

Oh, Tommy. You’re afraid of so many things, and you don’t even know it.

And it was an odd moment, knowing this so definitively about her. Tommy was so very clever, so worldly-wise, so cynical. He was sometimes uncomfortably in awe of her. But there was innocence left in her: her expression when he’d dragged his fingers along her jaw, that fire and yearning and amazement and fear that she was human after all, and could get lost in someone, and could get hurt. Her expression when she’d asked him about her father—that uncertainty, that hunger to
belong
to someone. She was the bravest person he knew, but there was a world of people—people like the Duke of Greyfolk, or his own father—of whom she had no knowledge. Whom she ought to fear. Who had the impersonal powers of destruction possessed by an iceberg. She truly had no idea, for nothing in her existence had yet prepared her for them.

“Then I suppose it’s best for all of us that what you want to do is rescue children, rather than conquer the British Isles and set yourself up as a despot.”

But he couldn’t help but say it gently, which won him a faintly suspicious frown.

“What makes you think I
don’t
want to do that?”

He snorted.

But he had a terrible suspicion that if she should choose to do that, he’d help her.

Chapter 21

J
ONATHAN PEERED IN THE
window of Klaus Liebman & Co. to make sure no Diamonds of the First Water were sitting in the posing chair.

And then he pushed the door open, and the bell jangled merrily.

“Klaus! I’ve brought you an assistant.”

Klaus turned around, saw Charlie, beamed, then rattled off something enthusiastic in German. Charlie stared up at him with enormous fascinated eyes. The only word Jonathan understood from all of it was “kinder.”

“He doesn’t speak German, Klaus,” Jonathan said wryly. “He’s an
English
child. And his name is Charlie.”

“My apologies. I am pleased to meet you, Charlie.” He bowed.

“You can bow to Mr. Liebman.”

The boy did, albeit a trifle cheekily. The way, Jonathan had discovered, he did nearly everything.

“Can you handle a broom, Charlie?” Jonathan asked.

“Can I handle a broom?” he snorted to his invisible audience. “I brushed beneath
wheels,
guv.”

“Charlie,” he said firmly. “A gentleman answers questions when one is addressed to him. Shall we try again?
Can
you handle a broom?”

“Aye. I can handle a broom.” Still cheekily, but at least he’d looked the two of them in the eye.

“Thank you. Excellent. Do you think you can handle tea, crumpets, and guinea fowl for dinner?”

The boy flinched, as though he’d been jabbed by a hot poker. His eyes flew open wide, and his gaze swung between Klaus and Jonathan.

And then to their astonishment, his face crumpled and he began to weep bitterly.

Jonathan exchanged a bewildered look with Klaus, who shrugged uncomfortably.

Argh
. He wished Tommy was here.

Jonathan dropped to his knees. “Charlie, Charlie, look at me. What is it? What is the trouble? You can tell me.”

Charlie peered up at him with watery woeful eyes. “Dinna tease me, guv,” he begged. “I’ll be good. Oatcake is just fine. Ye needn’t say the rest. I’ll stay and work and be good.”

“Tease you?” Jonathan was bewildered. “Charlie, tell me what you mean.”

“There willna be crumpets or tea.”

“There will,” Jonathan said firmly. “But what makes you say that?”