A Gentleman Undone (36 page)

Her head dipped forward, the back of her neck impossibly stark and vulnerable. The sight made him light-headed, his breath suddenly shallow. So easily he might have lost her tonight. If her pistol had misfired, if her aim had been less true, if just one highwayman had been a bit quicker in his reaction …

No. That way lay madness. He bent his attention to her buttons, small flat bone-colored things with carved edges that pressed unevenly into the pads of his thumbs.
Layer by layer, careful and chaste, he got her out of her clothing and down to her chemise. She could manage the rest without his help. He ought to withdraw to the bedroom and pour water into the basin so she could wash.

She was so tired, though. Her shoulders sagged. She hadn’t made the least attempt to play on what she must know of his susceptibility as he’d undressed her. She hadn’t even spoken since confiding her fear that she’d never feel better again.

Devil take it. He bent and lifted her into his arms. Her hand took a hold on his coat and her muscles all subsided against him, an acquiescence as gratifying as if it had been the first salvo of intimacy between them, rather than an overlooked piece of ordnance pitched in after the skirmish was well under way.

He stood for a moment, eyes closed, breathing in her scent. If only … Truly, it didn’t bear thinking of. But they’d been near in station once, youngest son and youngest daughter in respectable families, both with unstained, marriageable souls. If he could have met her then … he might have one day lifted and carried her in just this fashion, over a threshold and—

Madness, again. No use indulging those thoughts. The bedroom door stood partly open; he used his foot to swing it the rest of the way in. She lifted her head to view this room’s furnishings, shadowy shapes in the firelight. Chair, table, washstand, clothespress, and the bed, in all its austerity of black posts and white linen. He bore her there, and sat. If she asked what he thought he was doing, he would have no answer.

Her hand tightened on his coat. Her head ducked against his shoulder. Where his arms met her, round her shoulders, at the back of her knees, he could feel the muscles tensing as though to shrink herself small. “I
want to tell you something,” she said, and his heart began to race like a coursing hound.

“You can tell me whatever you wish.” He tightened his hold.

Twice she drew in breaths as though to begin speaking, only to let them out again. On the third breath, she managed it: “I spoke of my parents having died in an accident.”

Hell. Suddenly he knew the rest.

“In fact they were killed in a highway robbery. Murdered by men just like the ones we—” Her voice faltered and she pressed her face into his coat.

He let out a long breath, and touched his chin to her bound-up hair. “Were you with them?”

She shook her head, forehead brushing out a rhythm against the wool at his shoulder. “I was still recovering from the illness of which I’ve told you. They’d gone to look at a house, in another part of Lancashire. They intended …” She started trembling then, giving in to tears. “They planned to sell our house and move to a new neighborhood, where we could live among people who wouldn’t know …” Her hand let go his coat to swipe at her face. “Because of what I did, they would have had to give up everything familiar and start over among strangers. And because of what I did, they were on the road that night.”

He gathered her in closer, close as he could. She shuddered like some hapless small prey seized in the very jaws of grief. “It was bad luck.” With his flesh he would absorb her every shudder, just as he’d absorbed her rage when he held her back from the body of the man she’d shot. “Bad luck, and an evil act by villainous men. You’re not to blame.”

“I’ve told myself that.” She let the reference to luck pass unchallenged. “But I don’t find any comfort in it.” She pressed her head against his coat as though she
meant to burrow in there. “I try so hard not to think of what their last moments must have been.”

“I know, sweetheart.” Everything he had went into those words.
I know exactly how hard you have to work to keep that out of your thoughts
. He knew how banished memories, banished images hovered, only waiting to spot some breach in your defenses by which they might slip in. “Your nightmares …”

She nodded against his shoulder. “I think I’ve seen their end a hundred times or more.” She was breathing in gulps now, not well able to talk.

“I’ve lost my own parents, as I told you.” His left arm braced her shoulders and his left hand stroked her upper arm, a painfully paltry gesture of reassurance. “My mother in childbed when I was ten; my father after a long illness some few years ago. It’s difficult enough when it comes of a natural cause. No one should have to bear what you’ve borne.”

Should
. That was the flimsiest of notions, wasn’t it? Like pebbles from a slingshot against a raging tidal wave. Things happened to people, and they bore them, or failed to bear them, and
should
really played no part in the matter.

She pressed the heels of both hands to her eyes. “I didn’t bear it, truly. I wasn’t strong enough.” A hesitation. Her voice sank near a whisper. “I wanted to … quit life altogether.”

“Did you …” He swallowed. “Did you make any attempt to …” And then he saw. “Of course you did. You went to work in a brothel.”

Again she nodded. “I thought I would catch the pox, at least. I thought the suffering might … cleanse me even as it consumed me. Like fire.” For a moment she was silent, studying her own hands. “I was ignorant.” She wiped her palms together and let her hands fall.

“You were stronger than you thought.” He could see the rest of her story without her telling. She’d set out to destroy herself layer by layer, but at her core she’d found an unexpected will to survive, and with it, the ruthlessness that had powered her through life ever since. Out of the ashes of catastrophic misfortune she’d reinvented herself as something formidable, honed and tempered by each disaster she weathered.

She hadn’t, thank God, succeeded in destroying herself. She’d lived. And he’d found her. And here she was, in his lap, in his arms, confiding all her most difficult secrets, and he could not for the life of him see how he was ever to let her go.

“Stronger in some things, perhaps.” Her words tugged him back to the conversation. “But in others, wrecked beyond any hope of repair.” She shifted in his lap. He knew the language of her body now; she was preparing to say something important. “I will never love anyone again, Will. I cannot. You understand, I hope?” She didn’t look at him. She waited, still and taut, for his reply.

“Because … you don’t want to risk that kind of loss again?” Everything in his field of vision wobbled a bit, the way it might if he’d run at full speed into a brick wall.

“I
cannot
.” She articulated the syllables with painstaking precision. “Forgive my presumption. I don’t mean to imply that I believe you had any hopes of … I only want you to understand.”

“Of course.” Dry husks, those words, rattling all the way up his throat and out into the air. He did have hopes. And he didn’t understand. How could she give him this gift, spilling out her dark history, leaning on him for comfort, trusting him as he knew in his marrow she’d never trusted another man, and then slam a door and bolt it against what ought logically to follow?

He filled his lungs on one slow breath. She was waiting, hushed and motionless in his arms. She knew
Of course
could not be the whole of his answer. “I won’t lie to you, Lydia. If I’m not in love with you already I’m within striking distance of the state. There’s nothing presumptuous in your wanting to warn me, given what you must have observed these past few days.”

“We couldn’t ever have—”

“Shh. I know.” He set his hand at the back of her head, smoothing her hair to tell her she needn’t comfort him with all the reasons his love could never have come to fruition. “I can’t afford to keep you, and I know you don’t want to be kept. Our stations put marriage out of the question. And there are other reasons, besides, that prevent my offering myself to a lady. Nevertheless I wish you would love me. For all that I know better, I can’t help what my heart wants.” He eased his right arm out from under her knees until she sat upright on his lap, supported only by his left arm at her back. “There, I suppose, is another difference between us.”

“I’m sorry.” Her face was near his. Her eyes were red and swollen. “I like you very much, and I—I think my body spoke for itself this morning. But that’s all I can give. I wish I could grant you what you want, but it’s too late for me.”

“Never mind about it.” He pressed a kiss on her forehead. “It’s been a frightfully long day. Let me pour you some water and you can wash and go to bed.”

He lay awake for well over an hour after she’d dropped into sleep, partly on the watch for nightmares, partly reviewing all the scenes of their acquaintance as though he could somehow rearrange them to arrive at a different ending.

There
ought
to be a different ending. They belonged with one another. Her broken edges fit with his.

But Fate had no use for neat arrangements. Here they were, just as they’d been that first morning at Chiswell when he’d looked over his shoulder and seen her, hatless, in her insufficient cloak. Here after all was their condition, perched on their separate wind-whipped summits, in view of each other, but too distant to reach.

Chapter Nineteen

W
OULD SHE
never wake in the right bed again? That thought barely had time to take a toehold in her brain before a bolder, more reckless thought shoved it aside:
This
is
the right bed
.

Nonsense. She was sleep-addled, and not thinking clearly. The last few days had taken too much of a toll. Her brain had more important matters to weigh.

She lay still and let her senses wake one at a time. Linen against her skin, her hair loose on the pillow, no body touching hers. Several scents threaded together and apart. Bay rum and the man who wore it. Coffee, making her mouth water. Chocolate? Toast. Breakfast had somehow appeared.

A rustle of paper interrupted the silence: the page of a newspaper turned. She opened her eyes. Will Blackshear sat fully dressed in an armchair near the bed, the
Times
in one hand and the other hand feeling for his coffee on the bedside table. He landed upon it and lifted it just that way, palm curved over the top, fingertips spaced all round the cup’s perimeter, with no regard for the handle. He drank from it that way too, the arch between his thumb and forefinger providing sufficient space for the
purpose. When he set it down again he found the saucer on the first try, never looking away from his paper. She might just lie here, and watch that, and never get up from this wrong bed again.

His fearlessness took her breath away. Facing highwaymen unarmed. Telling a lady he was near to loving her after she’d already warned him the sentiment could meet with no return. She would never regret anything she’d shared with this man; not her body, not her numberish skills, not the grueling confidences of last night.

On her side of the table sat two cups. Coffee and chocolate, they must be. He hadn’t known which she preferred so he’d brought both. He’d set the saucers atop the cups, too, to keep them warm.

She closed her eyes. Something about the sight of those two covered cups struck at the rawest place inside her, the part that never gave up wishing for things she could not have.

If she were able to love him … if she could somehow undo the corrosion that had overspread her heart … if they could forge an arrangement as independent men and women sometimes did … she would only lose him in the end. No matter how he might love her now, he must finally leave her for a respectable lady who could give him children.

And it was right that he should. He ought to have children. He deserved a blooming, sunlit,
honest
kind of love, not a connection built on heedless grappling in dark hallways and other people’s beds. He deserved a wife who could know his family and take her place among them.