Chapter Eleven #2
It certainly could be, if you want it to be, he could have said. A vision of the no doubt creamy contours of Miss Woodville’s thighs flared into his mind’s eye, and
honestly, who could blame him? Men were capable of such dualities: hovering protectively near a female who was quaking in
his coat while reflecting on the velvety insides of her thighs. He was fully in control of his impulses, if not necessarily
the way his groin tightened.
“Blancmange is delicious on its own, right? Rich and satisfying and decadent. You don’t necessarily need to add chocolate
sauce to enjoy it. Or clutter it up with fruit. Would you agree?”
“Blancmange is nice, yes, Mr. Marchand.” She humored him.
“But if you had blancmange every single night, and it was the only dessert you were allowed to have, you might want to try
variations.”
She took this in.
She cleared her throat. “Ropes are a variation on . . .”
“Yes.”
When she fell quiet, he would have given nearly anything to hear the contents of her thoughts, while at the same time realizing
he was better off not knowing.
“Spanking, too?” she asked after a moment.
“Yes.”
“I see,” she said politely.
He stretched his arms out across the back of the bench. “But no such frills are needed when two people simply want each other
very, very badly.”
He said this idly, almost drowsily, as if it were a comment on the weather.
After a long moment, her shoulders rose and fell as she pulled in a long, long shuddery breath.
If she asked him what he meant by that, he decided he would tell her.
Explicitly.
She was testing her power over him by again and again inching over the usual boundaries of propriety that constrained a girl
like her.
He found her bold innocence erotic. And she knew it.
If he was a better man, he wouldn’t encourage it.
If he was a stronger man, he would not take the bait.
Or up the ante.
As it was, he felt as though he was leaving a sensual little breadcrumb trail leading right to his bed and this seemed both
inadvisable and impossible to stop.
“Thank you very much for the loan of your coat,” she finally said politely. “It’s helped with the shakes.”
“You’re welcome, Miss Woodville.”
“I’m embarrassed to be such a ninny.”
“Why? If you weren’t afraid of cutthroats, I’d be even more concerned about your sanity than I already am.”
“But I want to be afraid of nothing.”
“Good luck with that,” he said dryly.
“How did you get that way, Mr. Marchand?”
“What way?”
“Afraid of nothing. How did you manage it?” Her voice had gone small and urgent.
He knew a fresh surge of irrational fury that she’d been compelled to withstand so much fear that she wanted to be strong enough to never again feel it.
It struck him as both valiant and wrong.
If she, a gently raised aristocrat, felt that way, more than one man had failed to protect her. And it ought to have been easy for
all those spoiled men with whom she’d been raised not to fail her. What was the point of them, otherwise? What was the point
of men?
Clouds had parted over them and sunshine was slanting warmly down across his thighs. Apart from an ongoing slight ringing
in his biceps from the blows he’d just struck two men, sitting on a bench with her was strangely as pleasant a moment as he’d
had in a long time. Though of course these days every lovely moment brushed up against the edges of a sorrow, a regret about
what might have been.
He hated to interrupt this miniature idyll with the truth.
But he did anyway.
“Have you ever eaten a rat?”
She turned her head slowly and studied him at length. “But we just had breakfast.”
He laughed.
But he could read in her expression that she inferred a very good deal from his question. Her eyes were troubled, soft, and
wary.
Which meant she’d probably landed on the truth.
He didn’t think he’d ever outright told his story to anyone, not as a narrative: Once upon a time a boy was orphaned on the streets, that rot. As jaded as he was, within him lingered a superstition that if he gazed backward upon his past too long, greasy
black tendrils of it would reach out to snatch him back.
“I’m not fearless, Miss Woodville. I just grew up in the St. Giles rookery.
I was orphaned at the age of six. I never knew my father.
And I think the shortest answer is that when fear—and it comes in a wide variety of forms, like fear of hunger, fear of death—is all you know from the beginning, you don’t call it fear, you just call it life.
And you learn how to live within it the same way a fish born in the ocean learns to swim.
On some days, it even feels as though you’ve mastered it.
Invariably something happens to humble the devil out of you and prove you wrong.
And from that you learn a new set of lessons.
It’s a series of adaptations, day after day after day.
That, and being willing to do almost anything to survive. ”
He imagined telling her the rest. The things he’d never told anyone. He could turn it into a verbal house of cards, layering
grimy detail upon brutal anecdote, watching her lovely clear eyes go more and more pained and unnerved and repulsed until
he finally said the thing that permanently appalled her.
On the other hand, Miss Woodville was a chance-taker by nature. She would consider it a personal challenge to not even blink
as he told her worse and worse things. But he knew she would feel it, that she would picture it, and he knew darkness left
a stain if you let it settle into your imagination. He found he could not abide the thought of ever doing that to her.
“You would do anything to survive? Lie? Cheat? Steal?” She paused. “Sing?”
“Mmm . . . never, ever cheat. That’s a good way to get killed in the rookeries.
My philosophy is to keep things as simple as possible, and lying only complicates everything.
I’d lie when absolutely necessary. But never when doing business.
Likewise, stealing. I mainly stole only to eat or stay clothed, not for profit.
Notice, I said mainly. Probably because I was able to get odd jobs from about the time I was five years old.
These days, I do none of those things. But probably only because I no longer have to. ”
She seemed subdued. But she was regarding him thoughtfully, and, surprisingly, without a shred of judgment. Rather, with something
like awe.
He could not deny it was pleasant to be looked at that way. Or that he felt a slight sense of relief.
As if a belt long buckled too tightly had been released a notch.
The breeze lifted one of the spirals of black hair at her temples. He felt as though he could watch that lift and flutter
for a very long time and never be bored.
“That’s why you’re so elegant and clean,” she said finally, almost to herself. As if she’d been drawing a series of conclusions
in her mind.
He stared at her and felt a wayward flash of anger and a peculiar little flicker of fear, as though she’d just picked his
pocket. She had leaped to that correct assumption with an almost surgical precision. He was not at all accustomed to being
readable.
Now she looked uncertain. “I’m sorry. I just . . .”
“You’re right,” he admitted. “It’s remarkable how many of the things we take for granted are, in fact, luxuries. Food. Shelter.
Cleanliness,” he said shortly.
“And it’s why you hire boys from Bethnal Green. Because you grew up in the rookeries, and you want them to have better lives.”
She didn’t phrase it as a question.
“I hire them because they’re cheap and quick and grateful.” He was feeling a little self-conscious now.
“Oh, certainly. And the tutors you hire to teach them maths probably work for nothing. I happen to know that tutors do not
like to work for nothing.”
He hesitated. “I don’t hire tutors.”
Her jaw dropped. “You teach them maths!” Again, it was not a question. It was an amazed realization.
He did, in fact, teach them maths. As best he could.
Any moment now her questions would get a little too close to the bone and he needed to put a stop to that.
“So did you ask anyone else about me before you disrupted my life, Miss Woodville?”
“Yes. One more person.”
Her honesty amused him. “And?”
“She said you were dangerous. One of the worst men in London.”
He gave a short, stunned laugh. “You didn’t want to take a moment to soften that news?”
“I always feel as though you would take it as a personal affront if I attempt to soften anything.”
He smiled. For one moment, all he could do was sit there and like Miss Woodville.
“Well considered, Miss Woodville. And for all I know, your friend may be correct, though there hasn’t been a vote lately.
I might have been usurped from the top spot. Who said this to you?”
“Mrs. Haddock.”
“Oh, her.” He had no idea who Mrs. Haddock might be.
She laughed. Albeit somewhat cautiously.
“I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective, like anything else,” he allowed finally.
He was surprisingly not wholly displeased to hear himself described that way. He’d spent so many years being afraid that there
remained considerable satisfaction in being thought of as formidable.
He realized then that he could live with anything anyone chose to call him. He knew who he was. That was the only thing that
mattered.
He wondered if the thieves had dragged their carcasses off into the shrubberies by now.
“Isn’t it funny how we’re sometimes comforted by weight?” Miss Woodville touched the sleeve of the big coat draped over her.
“And sometimes oppressed by it. We describe responsibilities as a weight. And they do sometimes feel like an actual weight.”
She was thinking again about her duty to her family. He supposed it was never far from her thoughts.
She slid out from beneath his coat very carefully, smoothed it gently, and handed it back to him with a tender care that moved
him.
“That’s what life is, I suppose,” he said abstractedly, because his coat now smelled very, very faintly of lavender after
being close to her body. He surreptitiously brought it close to his face. “Nothing but paradoxes.”
As he pushed his arms into the coat sleeves again, he accidentally-on-purpose dropped the flint and steel he carried in his
pocket. It was a tactic. When he bent to retrieve it, he surreptitiously tucked the little object he’d found on the pavement
next to Miss Woodville’s walking shoe.
He sat up again.
“Do you think we saw all of the vases in the shop?” she asked.
“It certainly felt that way.”
“Mr. Marchand . . . what if I don’t find the vase? Doesn’t it feel as though we’ve reached a dead end?”
He was mordantly amused that they were a “we” now.
“Well, I don’t lie, cheat, or steal, Miss Woodville, but that doesn’t mean any of those options are off-limits to you. I suppose the question is, what are you willing to do to get what you want? I think a person only truly knows themselves
when they know the answer to that question.”
If he knew Miss Woodville, she was thinking about the offer he’d made in his office. One night, four thousand pounds, at least
some of her problems solved.
But that offer was beginning to feel like a sword dangling from a single thread over his head.
Some part of him was sorry now he’d made it, for reasons he preferred not to examine too closely.
“But I think there’s still a chance you’ll find the vase,” he concluded quietly, into the long silence. He didn’t think there
was a chance in hell, truthfully. He just wanted to soften some of the tension in her expression. He had come to realize that
her eyes were especially beautiful when lit with hope.
“What makes you think that?”
“Anything is possible and things can always get better before they get worse again. Life is a tide that rolls in and out.”
He stood. “Are you ready to go? Make sure you watch where you step this time.”
She glanced down at her feet.
And gasped.
“Mr. Marchand!” she said triumphantly. She snatched up the little stone he’d placed there—because that’s exactly what he’d
found—and held it aloft. “My third one in London! And I do think this is my best one ever. Look at the red stripe. Do you believe me now? It can only be a sign, don’t you think?”
She displayed it on her palm and he dutifully looked at it. “That’s a rock, all right,” he confirmed.
“Probably the closest I’ll ever come to holding your stony heart in my hand,” she said with mournful mischievousness.
“No doubt.” He stepped forward to scan the street for a hack. Serendipitously, one was approaching. He raised his hand to
hail it.
When he reflexively dropped his eyes to the ground, he realized he’d been looking for heart-shaped stones for days now.