“I understand that you wish to decry the article,” Daughtry said. “However, I’ll say it again: I strongly urge you to ignore the whole business. Acknowledging these allegations may endanger your claim to ignorance in the case that the countess is ruled a fraud. It would become much more difficult to end the marriage.”
End the marriage.
“But that’s no longer a concern,” Simon said—distantly, dimly, through the pulses suddenly thundering in her ears. “I’ve no interest in an annulment.”
“Of course,” replied the lawyer. “Nevertheless, it would be wisest to proceed in a manner that keeps every option available for you. Surely we can agree on that.”
Every option?
She turned away from the door, staring blindly across this fine, quiet hallway, the handsome wood and morocco paneling, the stone busts with their haughty noses: it all looked unfamiliar suddenly. Nothing to do with her. And she could not catch her breath. She was panting like an animal, cornered, tricked into a cage.
End the marriage.
That ceremony—she’d feared the minister a fraud. But all along, it had been the groom playing the trick on her. All the while, Simon had known that the marriage could be undone.
She found herself walking toward the lobby. Where was she going? Fool, her footsteps clipped as she stepped onto the checkerboard tile. Fool, fool, fool.
The stairs. She put her palm on the balustrade. He had been planning all along to put her aside if she was ruled a fraud. My God, she thought. The steps towered before her, an endless climb; her bones felt brittle and rusting; her joints ached. I hurt.
She climbed slowly, too slowly: the conversation had come to a quick end, and now, below, in the entry hall, Simon and Daughtry spotted her. She heard Simon call after her. It took all her effort, with one hand on the banister, to keep moving. It seemed important not to stop. She throbbed as though she’d been slammed into a wall. Why should she hurt like this? The banister was so smooth; he’d slid down it laughing like a boy, carefree, untroubled by his lies. She’d followed him down, so happy that it had felt as though she were flying.
This bloody house! The first night she’d entered it, she’d known it would end her.
The tears came all at once, a hot flood of grief that leaked from her slowly, steadily. She shouldered them away. Such a fool, she was, with no eye for reality, only stupid hopes. She’d trusted her mum. She’d trusted him. Clear enough, now, that she couldn’t trust herself.
Good God. Take him to the East End to dispel her last doubts, would she? A strange laugh ripped from her throat.
“Nell.” His arm hooked around her waist, firm, startlingly hot. He caught her, and with her momentum broken, she could do nothing but stand frozen, wobbling a little as he physically turned her to face him.
When he looked into her face, his own went pale. “What is it?”
She wet her lips. I heard you.
But when her lips moved, no sound came out. Some instinct demanded she keep quiet. He could get rid of her whenever he liked. Better not to displease him.
My God, she thought. Once again, I must keep a master happy for my keep.
His grip tightened. “Are you all right? What’s happened?” He looked down, but her body, of course, showed no injuries; her innards were shredded but he saw nothing amiss.
His eyes locked onto her hand; he took the note from her fingers, reading it quickly before looking up. “Has something happened to Hannah? I don’t understand. The mention of your stepbrother is ominous, but the note seems calm enough—”
God forgive her, that she’d scrupled to welcome Hannah’s invitation for fear of what he might think. Hannah was worth ten of him. Hannah always had stood by her, whereas he had always planned to leave her if his plot didn’t go as planned.
She saw the puzzlement come over his face and felt a spiteful, horrible pleasure at causing it. How easily his life had been laid out for him. He’d planned all the while to knock her out of it if she made it more difficult.
She didn’t owe him a word of explanation. She owed him nothing. She couldn’t bear to look at him right now, much less speak to him.
“I’m going to see her,” she told the space over his shoulder. Her voice wasn’t her own. Low and choked. Why did this hurt so much? If she had lost her heart, she could take it back. She would not let herself hurt like this.
“Of course,” he said. “I’ll have the vehicle brought around. Wait here.”
She watched as though from a great distance while he turned and bounded back down the stairs, athletic, so damnably concerned. He always knew the right face to wear, the best attitude with which to charm a girl. But it was a thin mask indeed, for it covered the face of a liar.
Why had he lied to her? They’d married on the cold hopes of a fortune. He might have told her that he planned to end the marriage if she was not found to be Cornelia Aubyn. He’d have lost nothing by being honest.
She put her fist to her chest, where it seemed a great weight was slowly crushing her. What profit had he hoped to gain by lying?
Had he told her the truth, she’d never have gone to his bed.
Knowing the marriage might end, she would never have risked getting with child by him.
She swallowed hard against the urge to vomit. God save her if she was pregnant. God save her if she’d bring another creature into this world to tremble and dance at a rich man’s whim!
“All right,” he called. Climbing back to her, he said, “Five minutes.”
Her sluggish brain pointed out that he was pulling gloves out of his pocket, putting them on. “You’re coming?”
He gave her a look of surprise. “Of course,” he said. “I wouldn’t let you go alone.”
“Of course,” she echoed. Aye, he knew how to play the attentive husband. He was a hand at crafting appearances. Why not? He could order the world to conform to his wishes. He would lie when it suited him, as long as it guaranteed his comfort. She’d never seen him less than confident.
But not in the Green. The Green was her world. He’d not be comfortable there. “Good,” she said.
Some note in her voice caused him to frown. “Is it the mention of Michael that troubles you? You needn’t worry—”
“No. It’s nothing.” Nothing troubled her but him, and he wouldn’t do so for long. She’d not cater to his good opinions a moment longer. She’d learned her lesson now. It had seemed like a fairy tale because it had never been true. Now she saw the truth. His judgments were as rotten as his word, and just as useless.
Her anger sharpened into resolve, spiteful and hot. Let him see the truth, then. Let him see her as she truly was.
Let him try to charm away the disease and poverty, too. Let him try to stay comfortable in a lane filled with sewage. In the East End, his brand of charm got you nothing.
Aloud, she said, “You’ll want to change your clothing. Put on your shabbiest if you’re coming to the Green.”
In the thoroughfare, the sun was blazing brightly. But here, in a muddy lane too narrow for Simon’s brougham to negotiate, the light barely penetrated. On either side, sagging buildings showed crumbling faces. Windows stuffed with rags and newspaper emitted sounds of life: a squalling child; a man’s hoarse groans; the raucous laughter of a woman. Occasionally the sweet strains of a fiddle wisped past, fading like ghosts into the shadows.
Simon noted these details absently, his focus trained on the woman who walked beside him. She stumbled now, but when he reached for her arm, she evaded his touch and walked faster.
His hand curled into a fist, which he returned to the pocket of his coat. What ailed her? On the drive, she’d denied aught was amiss, but the invitation from Hannah Crowley had thrown her into a darker mood than he’d ever witnessed.
Perhaps she was only nervous to show him her old world. He wouldn’t press her now. But once they were back in the brougham, he meant to know the cause of her temper.
“Mind your feet,” she said over her sh
oulder, her face shadowed by the plain, hooded cloak she wore. “Here and there the gutter runs open.”
He didn’t need eyes to know that. The smell of sewage, of pig offal and rotting vegetables, clogged the smoky air. Broken glass crunched beneath his boots. The mud puzzled him most of all. “It didn’t rain in the West End last night,” he said.
“Broken pipe.”
He glanced up the lane, seeing no end to the mud. “A very large pipe, then.”
“Does that surprise you?”
The anger in her voice baffled him. “The size, do you mean? Or the fact that it’s broken?”
She made some impatient noise. “No matter. The mud serves its purpose. Makes kneeling a touch easier on the knees, I reckon.”
He frowned. Was he meant to understand why kneeling should be required? Her stony profile yielded no clue to her thoughts.
“A problem down Mile End way, too,” she went on. “Puts me in mind of the time one of your lot was kind enough to throw me a coin thereabouts. I was up to my knees in the muck, scrambling to find it where it had fallen.”
Ah. “I see,” he said quietly. This explained, no doubt, her reaction to the beggar woman they’d encountered after Lady Allenton’s party.
“Reckon I should be grateful that some fancy folks carry cash with them,” she said. “Otherwise I’d have been crawling for naught.”
Her eyes flashed at him as though he’d been the one to throw the coin. “And then you met me,” he said slowly. “No need to think on such things any longer.”
She flushed. “Asking for gratitude, are you?”
“No,” he said, but his own temper was beginning to stir. If he’d committed some sin against her he’d be glad to learn of it. As far as he was aware, he was not her enemy.
“I expect you think I should be grateful, though! Such a far leap I took to wed you. Why, before you were kind enough to take a notice, I had to fight off the rats for my bread! Thought about cooking one, once, only Suzie said I could take plague from it. How do you like that?”
He came to a stop, staring at her through the scant beams of sunlight that penetrated the stinking gloom. “What in God’s name is this about, Nell?”
Her laugh sounded high and wild. “What’s it about? I reckon you would be asking yourself that—I’ll wager you never thought to wed a woman who might have eaten rat stew! Well, there are more stories where that came from, your lordship. How about the winter me stepbrother took to pissing himself to keep warm? I was right jealous of his aim! How do you feel about your wife now?”
His bafflement was briefly too large to compass. She gave him no opportunity to muster a reply, bounding past him up a stair and striking her shoulder into the door to open it.
“Nell,” he said as he followed her—but found himself alone inside a shabby little entry hall built to house a sagging staircase that he would, in the normal order of things, have hesitated to test with his weight.
She’d already started up it and so he followed. At the first landing, he made the mistake of placing his hand on the banister. The whole thing wobbled in his hand, and a laugh—of astonishment, of unhappiness—slipped from him.
He stepped around the corner to find her glaring down at him.
“If you fall,” she said, “no doctor will be coming for you. It took a month’s hard thieving to earn the money that bribed one of them to meet my mum at a church.”
To hell with this treatment. He did not deserve her scorn. He’d done nothing to merit such a manner. “They would come,” he said through his teeth. “For the Earl of Rushden, they would come anywhere in the goddamned world. That makes it all the more galling for you, I suppose.”
Her face whitened. She whirled and continued up the stairs. At the next landing she threw her fist against the first door, which opened immediately.
A short, spare, silver-haired woman stepped out, smiling. “Nell!” she exclaimed. “Now here’s a lovely sight for sore eyes.”
He paused on the last step as his wife moved into the woman’s arms. The sight of her strained face turning into the older woman’s bosom—the ferocity with which she wrapped her thin arms around the woman’s waist—touched off a cold foreboding in him. She looked … crushed.
Whatever troubled her had nothing to do with coming to Bethnal Green. His gut informed him that it had everything to do with him.
He stepped onto the landing. The older woman glanced up with a frown. “Who’s this?” she asked as she pulled free of Nell.
Nell also turned to look at him, and in her expression, he saw something dark and tight and ungiving. His throat tightened.
It had been years since he had felt a shadow of his old awkwardness, of his inability to satisfy or charm—but in this rickety, pathetic hallway, he suddenly remembered with visceral force what it had meant to be judged and found miserably wanting.
He racked his brain. What had he done?
“That’s my husband,” Nell said, and then walked past the woman into the Crowleys’ flat.
Hannah cast down her knitting and rose from the rocking chair to give Nell a hug. As Nell let go, her eyes fixed on the chair. Not eight or ten weeks ago, she had sat in that same seat (had sat there as still as possible: the chair lacked for one rocker, always had done) and felt so easy in her skin. Now she felt the last thing from easy. Her skin didn’t seem to fit her anymore. Her misery had caused it to shrink around her.
Simon was taking Hannah’s hand, murmuring some empty flattery over her knuckles. Nell wrapped her arms around herself. She’d never let herself want the things she couldn’t have, and now that she knew that she couldn’t depend on having him, the very sight of him hurt. If only he weren’t so beautiful—dark and lean and graceful, even in his oldest togs.
Mrs. Crowley had known with one glance that he didn’t belong here. Arrogance was stamped in his bones. For eyes bred in the Green, it was obvious he was somebody to fear.
She sat heavily into a Windsor chair. Her idiocy burned in her chest. God help her, she’d imagined them equals. She’d thought him bound by the law as completely as she was. Her rotting, broken brain! How had she forgotten the lessons of the world? Everything worked differently for his kind.
She’d known it was too good to be true.
She had nobody to blame for her breaking heart but herself.
Hannah was trying to give the rocking chair to Simon. “Keep it for yourself,” Nell said—too shortly; everybody gave her a look of surprise.
“But it’s the largest we’ve got,” Hannah said. “And he saved me from jail, didn’t he?”
Mrs. Crowley brightened at these tidings. “Why—of course he did! Sure and I’m a fool for not putting two and two together. I’ll insist on another hug from you, lad.”
Over the woman’s shoulders, Simon met Nell’s eye and winked. He didn’t understand that he might have been winking at a stone. He’d never faced anyone who didn’t bend to him in the end.
My father didn’t bend.
The thought gave Nell strength. Aye, she would be like stone to him. Let him do as he will. Let him think what he liked. Let him sneer, even.
The vision rose up sudden and vivid: his chiseled lips curling in contempt as he looked her over.
She’d told him she’d begged on her knees. God above …
She gritted her teeth and made her hands into fists, hidden in her skirts. Yes, she had told him that, and if he sneered, she wouldn’t care. She’d sneer back at him.
He took a seat in the rocker and looked around the room, inspecting it like one of the do-gooders on their home visits. But the Crowleys didn’t require his pity. Their flat had three well-ventilated rooms, the largest of which faced the Green itself. The fresh breeze that passed through the window carried the scent of growing things in the park, clean and pleasant. Nell had always loved passing the time here—a safe and spacious place, blessed by a family that cared for each other.
But as she followed Simon’s regard, his presence twisted he
r view. She noticed for the first time the shabbiness of the rough lath-and-plaster walls, chipping in some places, yellowed in others from the damp. The crude wooden floorboards didn’t fit together as much as they battled each other in a hopeless bid to lie flat. The crockery on which Mrs. Crowley now produced biscuits and cake had a substantial piece missing from the rim.
In the world she’d just left, this was wretched living, and no doubt of it.
She turned her eyes back to Simon. He could judge her all he liked. But if by word or look he made her friends feel bad, she’d carve out his heart with a spoon.
Evidently he’d decided to ignore her. With a smile, he took a biscuit from Mrs. Crowley. His thanks made the woman blush. Then he settled back, somehow making himself comfortable in Hannah’s seat—occupying it with a look of ease, for all that his knees rose higher than his thighs—and made some friendly remark to Hannah, who laughed.
When Nell relaxed slightly, he sensed it—glancing toward her, his brow lifting. Was that a question on his face? Or did he think he should be congratulated for daring to eat with the laborers?
“Mum used to have a chair like the one you’re using,” she told him. “We had to burn it one winter to keep the fire going. Would have frozen to death, otherwise.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Hannah’s startled look. Simon said neutrally, “Was that the same year Michael pissed himself to stay warm?”
Mrs. Crowley made a choking noise. “D-dear me,” she sputtered, as Nell felt her face catch fire. “Tea went down the wrong way.”
“Michael pissed himself to stay warm?” Hannah asked, her eyes very round.
“Why don’t you tell Nell and his lordship your news?” Mrs. Crowley said hastily.
“Oh! Your stepbrother came by,” Hannah exclaimed. “Nell, he left you something!”
Nell ripped her eyes from Simon’s, hesitating a moment before taking the small bundle of cloth that Hannah had plucked off the table. Michael was not a gift giver by nature. “Poison, I reckon?” she muttered. “What did he say?”