Chapter Eighteen #2
“Now,” he said. “It’s already beyond late.” How long had they been here? “My coachman is probably asleep at his post.”
A groan, low and annoyed. “Then what will half an hour more matter? Let the poor man have his nap.”
She was surly upon waking, then. It seemed an important thing for a man to know. Especially one who would soon be married to her. “You have got to be home before sunrise,” he said. “And I…I have got to arrange a meeting with the Archbishop.” As soon as possible. Today, even.
Understanding at last that he was not simply going to allow her to fall back to sleep, Grace dragged herself upright, her tousled hair cascading over her shoulders. “Fine,” she groused. “I need my—oh,” she said as she spotted her clothing piled beside her. “Efficient of you.”
“I’ve got the hairpins, too,” he said as she climbed out of bed, delightfully naked. Her loosed hair concealed her breasts, but wasn’t quite long enough to hide the soft curve of her belly, the voluptuous arches of her hips.
“And my tuppence?” she asked cheekily as she twitched her chemise over her head and reached for her petticoats and stays.
“Don’t press your luck.”
A flash of annoyance from those vivid green eyes as she smoothed out her petticoats and tightened the laces of her stays. “I earned it!”
“I suppose you did.” But he wasn’t about to go scrounging about on the floor for a tuppence coin she didn’t need and which another man had tucked between her breasts to begin with.
“How is it that you ended up serving drinks here?” he asked as he watched her don her dress, tugging it into place.
As it had been meant to be worn, it was very nearly modest, but for the fact that she had entirely too much bosom to fit comfortably within the bodice.
“The tavern was particularly busy this evening,” she said. “I asked the barkeep for a position, and offered to work this evening without pay to prove my worth. No one would turn down an extra set of hands they don’t have to pay for.”
Clever. “And if that hadn’t worked?”
“I would have served drinks anyway. What serving staff they have got are overworked; so long as the food and drink are delivered, it wasn’t terribly likely anyone would care by whom.
” She settled back onto the bed with her shoes and stockings.
Those lovely calves gleamed golden in the lamplight.
“Probably,” she said, “the serving maids would only assume another of their number had done it. Who in their right mind would work for free?”
She would, apparently, if there were something to be gained by it.
“And how did you get here to begin with?”
“The usual way,” she said as she wiggled her toes into a stocking and rolled it up her leg. “I took a hack.”
A hack. She had taken a damned hack. To Whitechapel. Henry pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose and breathed deeply. “Surely your sisters wouldn’t have allowed you to leave the house.”
“They don’t allow me to do anything,” she said as she slipped on her shoes. “I’m four and twenty; I make my own decisions. Of course they would have tried to dissuade me—”
“Anyone of sense would have done.”
“So I admit that I did sneak out, in order to avoid an argument. We hadn’t an engagement this evening, which was quite convenient. I simply pleaded a headache after dinner and then made my way out of the house when my sisters were putting the children to bed.”
“And you can get back in? Do you have your—” What had she called it? A jemmy?
Grace rolled her eyes. “Henry, I live there. I have got a key.”
Oh. Of course she had.
“My pins, please.” She held out her hand and he dropped the pins into it. “What business have you got with the Archbishop?” she asked as she began raking her fingers through the tangle of her hair to put it in some semblance of order before she wound it up.
“Obtaining a special license.” While he still had the right to apply for one, before scandal and shame made it a veritable impossibility.
“A—” Her fingers froze in the process of pinning her hair in place. “A special license?” she repeated, as if the words hadn’t quite made sense.
He allowed himself a grim nod.
“A marriage license?” she squeaked.
“What other sort of license would I obtain from the Archbishop?”
Those vibrant green eyes raked his face, her shoulders slumping as she finished pinning up her hair, her hands falling into her lap. “This is not the sort of decision to be undertaken lightly,” she said. “It merits discussion first.”
What was there to discuss? He had compromised her. Thoroughly. More than once. “There is nothing to discuss. I own up to my mistakes, and—”
She shot up from the bed so quickly that it startled him. Her shoulders stiffened. Her hands flexed at her sides. “I am not a mistake,” she said, in a furious little voice.
“That wasn’t what I meant,” he said.
“Wasn’t it? It is what you said.”
Henry swallowed hard, scrubbed at his mouth. “I only meant that there are some actions which cannot be undone.” She could already be pregnant. “I won’t have my child born a bastard.” As he had been.
She jerked back as if he had slapped her. “I’m a bastard,” she said, her voice warbling across the words. Her expression wavered, that firm little chin quivering. Not just anger, but hurt. Humiliation.
Christ, he was bungling this badly. “Grace—”
“No!” she thrust one hand out to stay him.
“My God. You really are no different from the rest of them, are you?” She pursed her lips together to still their trembling.
With a scathing sound, she began to shove in the rest of her pins.
Haphazardly, with no real care. “Consider yourself absolved of whichever sins you imagine yourself guilty of,” she said. “There isn’t going to be a baby.”
“You can’t know that.” Could she?
“I know that my sister Charity has got an herbal tea which has kept her from conceiving when she didn’t wish it,” Grace said. “So there is no need to worry over that.”
Anxiety tied a knot in his gut. “We still have to marry,” he said desperately. “You’re not a virgin any longer. Your husband will expect you to be.”
“Please,” she said scornfully. “Half the Ton likely thinks I was ruined long ago. Not being a virgin won’t harm my marriage prospects.
I have got an astronomical dowry after all.
If I wanted a husband, I would have one with the snap of my fingers—my lack of virginity notwithstanding.
I don’t need you—no.” Her breath came in fierce little pants between the clench of her teeth, a macabre parody of her passion of only an hour or so earlier.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want you, and I won’t have you. ”
“You don’t mean that.” She couldn’t mean that.
They had to marry. The choice had been taken from her hands the minute he’d gotten her alone in this room.
He had taken the choice from her hands. His mistake—and now it was his responsibility to rectify it before she suffered the consequences of his actions.
A lift of her chin. The hint of a sneer played about her mouth. “There is no scandal on earth that could persuade me to marry a man who doesn’t want to marry me. One has only to look at your face to see you couldn’t be less pleased.”
Henry yanked at the knot of his cravat, his throat gone tight.
“I’ll admit that the circumstances are…less than ideal,” he said.
Despite the lessons of his youth, the lengths to which he’d gone to avoid the selfsame mistakes his parents had made, somehow he’d fallen straight into them anyway.
And there was no excuse for it. He’d known precisely what he’d been doing.
“Grace, there isn’t any choice.” Because he’d made it for both of them already, twisted choice into necessity.
He had trapped her into marriage. Even the scantest possibility of a child had ensured it. “We must marry.”
“Don’t. Just—just don’t.” With a ragged little sound she turned sharply on her heel and strode for the door.
“You can’t leave,” he said desperately, rising to his feet.
“I assure you, I am quite capable of making my own way home.”
“Grace, please,” Henry pleaded. He reached for her hand, and she snatched it away from him.
“I am trying to do the right thing. The proper thing.” A mistake that couldn’t be undone, but could still be remedied.
He could still protect her from the consequences.
But it had to be done quickly. “If nothing else, your family will expect that of me.”
“My family would never ask me to sacrifice myself on the altar of marriage just to avert a scandal. God knows we’ve been through enough of them already.
I suppose it was simply my turn.” Her hand yanked the door open.
For one moment she stood still as a statue, poised just over the threshold.
She cast one last excoriating look over her shoulder, those emerald eyes shimmering with recriminations, with loathing.
With tears.
“I am not a mistake,” she seethed. And she slammed the door in his face.