Devilish Lord, Mysterious Miss

Chapter Three

Mary was standing on the edge of a cliff. She could hear waves pounding the shore far below, but it was too dark to see them. It was too dark to see anything. One false move, and she might go tumbling down to her doom.

Her heart started to race. Her legs shook. And, just as she had somehow known it would, the ground beneath her feet crumbled away and she was falling, falling, her mouth open wide in a soundless scream…

She landed with a bump, in the bottom of a small boat, winded, but unharmed. The dark gentleman had been there, waiting to catch her. His arms broke her fall.

It was not dark down here in the boat with him. The sun was shining. She felt warm and secure lying in the dark gentleman’s arms, being gently rocked as the waves lapped against the boat. She could hear gulls keening. She looked up into a vast, cloudless sky, the kind of sky you never saw in London, fettered as it was by rooftops rank with smoking chimneys.

He smiled down at her as she relaxed into his hold with a sigh.

‘I know you want me to kiss you,’ he said, and lowered his head…

With a jolt, Mary woke with the blankets twisted round her legs. The feeling of tranquillity dissipated under a sharp blast of shame. How could she be dreaming about kissing a man? That man! She could not seriously be considering Molly’s suggestion she become his mistress!

Could she?

Sick with self-disgust, Mary pulled her nightgown out from under Molly’s leg, and wriggled out of the bed she shared with her and Kitty, one of the other seamstresses who lived with them over the shop.

She pulled her wrapper round her shoulders, and padded barefoot up to the workroom. The sun was not yet up, so she lit one of the lamps Madame Pichot kept available when her girls had to work beyond the hours of natural daylight, and settled onto her stool by her embroidery frame.

She had intended to distract herself from the disturbing feelings the dream had unleashed, by getting on with some work. But her mind stayed stubbornly focussed on the dark gentleman, like a stray dog gnawing at a stolen bone.

She had woken just before his mouth had touched hers, but she already knew what it would feel like. Though in the dream he would not have kissed her as he had done in the gin shop, with frustrated anger. No, he would have kissed her tenderly, lovingly, exactly as she would want him to…

No! She did not want him to kiss her! She was not that sort of girl! She did not want to snuggle up to him, and put her arms round him, and…and…comfort him with her own kisses…why that would make her no better than a harlot!

She could not understand the person she had become in the Flash of Lightning. Before last night, she would have sworn that she feared and reviled men. All men. She had never wanted to receive the sort of lewd advances that other girls found flattering.

So why had she not felt the slightest inclination to jerk her hand out of his when he had grasped it? Why had she not wanted to struggle away from him when he had crushed her to his chest and kissed her?

She supposed she could argue that she would have been glad of anything that distracted her from sliding down into one of her panics. And she had certainly not been able to think about horses once he had swept her into his arms.

He had overwhelmed every one of her senses. His breath had been warm against her face, his hands strong and determined, yet they had not bruised her shoulders when he had pulled her against the hard wall of his chest, where her nostrils had filled with the scents of him. Expensive linen and fine milled soap and warm, clean man…

She sucked in a sharp, shocked breath. There she went again, savouring an experience that should by rights have scared her. Why had the feel of his arms closing round her felt like…she forced herself to admit it…like coming home? She rubbed at a dull, nagging ache that was thrumming at the base of her skull. It was ridiculous! He was a complete stranger to her.

A stranger who had managed to breach all her defences with one kiss!

One kiss, she sighed, and she could not stop thinking about him.

Oh, she pressed her palms against her flushed cheeks, she hoped she never saw him again!

If Molly was right, and he was about to make her a dishonourable offer, she did not rightly know how she would answer. She knew what she ought to answer. Of course she did. But would she be strong enough to say no? If he spoke to her again, kissed her again, this time gently, persuasively, as he had been about to kiss her in her dream, would she have the courage to stand firm in her beliefs?

Because, for one blissfully sinful moment, until Fred had come to her rescue, she had felt as though there was nowhere else she would rather be.

She, who had felt alone amongst strangers for as long as she could remember, had felt a connection with him that defied explanation.

Surely she had the moral strength to resist the temptation to go away with the first person who had ever made her feel as though she belonged somewhere?

No wonder, she sighed, so many women abandoned honest, hard toil, and took to a life of vice. If she could feel this torn after one fleeting encounter with a man she knew practically nothing about…She shivered. Perhaps her first instinctive reaction to his advent in her life had been the right one. To run far, far away to a place where he could never find her. Because he was dangerous. Dangerous to her.

‘Heavens, girl, what’s to do with you now?’

Mary started, discovering Madame Pichot hovering over her, her lips pursed with disapproval. She had not heard her come into the workroom. Not that that was so unusual in itself. She was often so immersed in her work that hours passed without her being conscious of anything else that went on in the room around her.

What was unusual was that Madame had caught her staring into space, her hands idle.

No wonder Madame looked displeased. Mary had not been herself since the day she had come running home in a panic from her errand to Curzon Street. Her nights were full of disturbing dreams of the dark man. And all day long her thoughts kept straying in his direction. She had to keep yanking them back to her work by force of will. She hung her head, embarrassed to have to acknowledge that for the first time ever, she was behind with her work.

Madame reached down, took hold of Mary’s chin in her strong, capable fingers, and jerked her face up.

‘Stars in your eyes,’ she muttered angrily. ‘You’ve come back from wherever Molly took you last night with stars in your eyes.’ Her fingers squeezed more tightly as Mary squirmed guiltily. She had known Madame would see through Molly’s excuses for taking so long over what should have been a straightforward errand. She had sent the girls straight up to their room without comment, and Molly seemed to think they had got away with it. But Madame’s next words chilled Mary to the bone.

‘Once the gentry start going back to their summer homes, I’m turning that girl off for last night’s work.’ She looked right through Mary as she voiced her thoughts aloud, treating her, as she had done from the first, as though she was a half-wit. Mary could understand how that attitude had originated. She had been in a terrible state on the day she had arrived. Almost beside herself after the rigours of the journey, and what had happened to her before setting out. For weeks, the slightest thing had triggered debilitating episodes of blind panic, which had meant she hardly got any work done.

The other workers had soon learned it was not safe to ask her questions about where she came from. Whenever she had tried to provide explanations, groping back into the unrelenting blackness where the knowledge should have been, she was overwhelmed by such a devastating sense of loss that it brought her actual, physical pain. So severe she could scarcely breathe through it. It was like…drowning.

Pretty soon, the girls stopped asking her. And Mary stopped trying to probe into that maelstrom of darkness and pain. It was a bit like coming to an uneasy truce with herself. She did not deliberately try to provoke her memory, and for the most part, it left her alone.

And Madame, discovering that when Mary was calm she could do far more than merely sew a seam, that she was in fact far more highly skilled with her needle than any of her other workers, had begun to treat her like a pet dog. A dog that could perform amazing tricks, and was therefore worth cosseting, but not quite on a par with a real person.

‘I can get another such as her for the crooking of my finger,’ Madame continued relentlessly. ‘Girls who can sew fall over themselves to work in an establishment such as mine, Mary, where they can get fair wages for an honest day’s work.’

Most girls, yes, but not her. Madame had only agreed to take her on as a favour to the friend who had sent her to London. Mary had her board and food. She got nice clothes, which she made for herself during the winter months, when custom was slack. She had sturdy boots, and attractive bonnets and warm gloves, for Madame insisted her girls looked well turned out when they went to church.

But hard coin never came into her hands.

‘I trusted you to go out and take your prescribed exercise, because I thought you were different from the other girls. That you were so scared of men that you would never idle away my time flirting with footmen in the houses I send you to, or loitering on the streets to see if you can catch the eye of some Bond Street buck. And then you come back here, reeking of the tavern, with stars in your eyes!’

She let go of Mary’s chin then, as though she was disgusted by the prolonged physical contact.

‘I thought all you needed to keep you happy was a piece of satin, and a dish of beads! The longer you worked for me, the calmer you seemed to become. Are you not happy working for me?’

Mary heard the threat implicit in Madame’s question and went cold inside. What would become of her if Madame turned her off? She had no family, no friends outside this workroom. Nor did she possess the survival skills of Molly and her ilk.

Mary stared at her, aghast. She no longer looked like the patient benefactress who tolerated her deficiencies because she had a charitable nature, but like a hardheaded businesswoman who had risen to the top of her profession by sheer determination. With her slightly protuberant eyes, her dark, wispy hair coiled round her head in a plait, and the way she had held Mary’s chin with fingers that felt like steel pincers, she could see exactly how Molly could liken her to a spider, grasping hold of a fly she had caught in her web. Molly and the other girls had always seen this side of her. Because they had their wits about them.

Now she, too, saw how precarious her position was. How totally dependant she was on this woman’s good will.

‘Please don’t turn me off when the Season is over,’ Mary pleaded. ‘I promise I won’t go into a tavern ever again! Indeed, I did not like it!’

Madame glared at her for a few seconds, before apparently coming to a decision.

‘I cannot go on pampering you as I have done, if this is how you repay me,’ she said coldly. ‘A daily walk, indeed! None of the other girls are granted such indulgence.’

None of the other girls worked quite so hard as she did, though, Mary surprised herself by thinking mutinously. They did not get so caught up in their task that they forgot to eat. They chattered, and got up to stretch and peer out of the window, or peek at the titled customers that came into the downstairs showrooms, while Mary kept her head down, and worked relentlessly, exhausting herself so that when she was finally permitted to leave her station, she hoped she would fall into bed and sleep dreamlessly.

‘Well, I shall certainly not permit you to leave these premises again until I can be certain I can trust you not to go making assignations. And no more sitting about, mooning over whoever it was you dallied with last night either. No man ever brought a woman anything but trouble. You must forget him! Do I make myself plain?’

‘Yes, Madame,’ said Mary with heartfelt relief. She was not, apparently, going to lose her job, and her home along with it, for the foreseeable future. Nor was she going to be going outside where she might risk running into the disturbingly seductive dark gentleman, either. And by the time Madame’s temper had cooled down, so would his ardour. People of his class, from her experience of the spoilt débutantes and titled ladies who came into the shop downstairs, did not possess a scrap of patience. They all wanted their whims satisfied quickly, or they grew petulant. And he was a lord, she recalled. Molly had mentioned his title. It was something like Harrison. Something with a lot of ‘s’ s in it, anyway. And a lord would not hanker after one particular seamstress for very long, if she knew anything about it. By the time she next ventured out of doors, he would have tracked down someone else who reminded him of his lost lady, and forgotten all about her.

‘Well, then, go and get some clothes on,’ Madame snapped. ‘And do not even think about getting any breakfast. You have wasted enough of my time today as it is!’

It was a fitting penance. Every time her stomach rumbled, Mary would remember how tempted she had been by the deceptive kisses of a stranger.

‘Thank you, Madame,’ Mary breathed, thankful the entire episode was over. She only hoped she would soon stop feeling guilty. It was not as if she had invited the man to accost her. No, he had rudely invaded, and taken up residence in her thoughts without the slightest bit of encouragement from her.

She would just have to turn her back on thoughts of him, just as she shut out the other shadows that tried to creep up and menace her hard-won sense of tranquillity.

That was all she really wanted.

To be at peace.

Lord Matthison winced as Ephraims applied a fresh piece of raw steak to his rapidly blackening eye. His knuckles were grazed, and it hurt to breathe too deeply, but by God, it had felt good to hit someone. Several someones. Seven years of holding back his grief, his anger and despair, had erupted last night in the Flash of Lightning, he realised.

But the satisfaction in inflicting as much pain upon everyone around him as he bore within himself had only brought temporary relief. By the time he had limped home, his mind had been in complete turmoil over the red-head.

One minute he was convinced she was Cora. Then his whole being would revolt at the very notion.

Because if that woman was Cora, then what the hell had been going on for the last seven years? He certainly had not imagined the extraordinary success her shade had brought him at the tables.

Unless…he sat forwards, clutching the steak to his eye as Ephraims gathered his bloodied shirt up from the floor. Supposing winning on those horses had just been a fluke. One of those lucky streaks that happen to gamblers from time to time. He had been barely twenty years old, half out of his mind with grief, spurned by his family and friends at a time when he needed them most. Had he just clung to the idea there was still one person who would not turn her back on him?

And his subsequent successes—could they have more to do with the fact that he never played but when he was stone-cold sober? And that he knew when to stop?

He shot to his feet, flinging the steak on to the dish on the table, dismissing it and Ephraims with a peremptory wave of his hand.

‘Don’t be angry with me, Cora,’ he pleaded, terrified lest she be offended by this lack of faith in her. ‘I still believe in you. I do!’

He refused to believe that red-headed woman could possibly be Cora! Why, she’d had no idea who he was or what he was talking about. He paced across the room, running his fingers through his hair. Cora would never have forgotten him! They had been everything to each other! Besides, the woman he had mistaken for Cora had looked completely at home amongst the denizens of that gin shop. Whereas Cora had been shy. And opposed to strong drink. It was unthinkable that she could have changed so much!

And Cora had no reason to flee to London. Not one that made any sense.

He paced the room for several minutes, torturing himself with an imaginary lover, with whom she had eloped. Of an illicit pregnancy, which she dared not confess to her brother.

He went cold inside. Robbie’s temper was formidable. She might have been afraid of what Robbie might do. But surely, he groaned, she could have confided in him?

He went to the washstand, where he bowed over the basin, and dashed a jug of cold water over his head. And was flooded with relief at the recollection that there had been no mention of a child of any sort in Grit’s report.

Of course not.

Cora had not taken a lover. Or been pregnant. She had loved him!

The woman was not Cora, that was all there was to it!

But what if she was? a persistent little voice nagged at him.

‘Dammit all to hell!’he growled, reaching for a towel and burying his face in it. If the woman he had seen in the gin shop was Cora, then she owed him an explanation for the suffering he had endured on her account! And if not…he tossed the soiled towel to the floor.

Well, he was not going to break faith with Cora. He might have kissed the woman, but that was only because he had been so sure, in that instant…

He was just going to have to establish, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she was not Cora, that was all.

And the quickest way to do that, he suspected, would be to walk back into that gin shop, and start to make enquiries amongst the people she associated with.

But not straight away.

He deliberately waited the few days it took him to regain his sense of equilibrium before returning to the gin shop where he had caught her carousing with…no, not scum. The men she had been with were at least honest and hard working. He paused on the threshold of the Flash of Lightning, scanning the room until he spied the men she had been with the night he had seen her, held her, kissed her…

Muttering a curse, he stalked across the room to the very same table where he had committed that act of gross folly. And stood there, calmly letting the conversation dry up as the men, one by one, became aware of his presence.

The one who had been sitting next to Cora, the one who had been so eager to rush to her defence, rose slowly to his feet.

‘Thought we’d seen you off for good on Friday,’ he growled. ‘You got no right coming back here.’

The other men around the table growled their agreement.

Rather than argue that he had a perfect right to enter any drinking den in London, or anywhere else he chose, Lord Matthison kept his expression neutral as he replied, ‘I have returned to compensate the landlord for any breakages that occurred. And to offer my apologies for poaching on your territory,’ he addressed Cora’s defender directly. ‘She bears such a remarkable resemblance to my late fiancée, that for a moment or two…’ He tailed off, with a slight shrug of his shoulders. ‘I hope you will believe me when I tell you I intended no insult to your…wife.’

He had no idea what connection the red-head had to these men. But he had seen them all leap to her defence from what they interpreted as his assault, as if she was one of their own. If he wanted to find out more about her, this was the place to start.

‘Mary’s not my wife!’ Fred protested, turning red as a couple of the other men at the table sniggered. ‘But nor could I just sit there and let someone grab her like that. No, not if he was a royal Duke I couldn’t!’

‘Scurvy thing to do,’ said another of the group. ‘Taking advantage of a simpleton in that way.’

‘It was as well it was Fred as saw you trying to steal a kiss,’ said another, ‘after what Molly threatened not five minutes before you walked in.’ There was a moment’s thoughtful silence, then the entire group burst out laughing.

‘She’d have torn you limb from limb!’ declared the one who had been cuddling Cora’s female companion, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. ‘You couldn’t have employed that right hook against her!’

Taking advantage of the relaxation in the atmosphere, Lord Matthison took a place at the table, and clicked his fingers for service. After he had ordered a round of drinks, Fred clapped him on the shoulder, admitting,

‘If it hadn’t been you, it’d uv bin someone else. There’s nearly always a fight in here of a Friday night.’

‘Usually a woman what starts it, too, one way or another,’ bitterly asserted a man on the other side of the table whose fists, Lord Matthison recalled ruefully, had made such an indelible impression on his ribs.