Chapter 19 #2
Henrietta turned to face them, putting a hand over her heart. “Yes, I promised all of you aid. I must stop home to collect the coin to pay your fines, and then I will take each of you to the Sisters of Benevolence Hospital, or wherever you wish.”
The warden snorted. “Ye cain’t take ’em out. Ain’t the rules.”
“Oi, ye can spring us now, mum,” several voices begged. A hand or two clutched a ruffle on her gown.
“Back, ye draggle-tails!” the warden shouted, fingering the club at his belt.
“Keep my card,” Henrietta said, knowing most of them couldn’t read the direction she had printed on the back. “If you are not here when I return, come to the Sisters as soon as you can. I promise—oof!”
A hard arm snaked around her waist and lifted her from the floor, pressing the air out of her lungs. “You are leaving now, Henry,” Darien said, his voice full of wrath.
His body felt hard and at the same time supple, as if he were dangerous steel swathed in a few layers of protective fabric.
A curl of pleasure curled through Henrietta’s midsection at the contact of her body with his.
She had the insane urge to curl into his arms in surrender, lay her head on his shoulder, and let him take her where he willed.
Obstinately, she held stiff as the warden swung the barred door shut, shouting at the women still inside.
“I have to— You must put me down, Darien,” Henrietta said, squirming.
“Not until you are delivered to the coach, baggage.”
The scowl made him more handsome, not less. Henrietta felt a great wash of tenderness roll through her stomach, pressing on her bladder. He was still angry with her, but he was here.
She blinked, the grit of sleeplessness in her eyes. “Why did my uncle not come for me?”
“Pelton is in the carriage. He thought it best that he not be seen personally exonerating a person the Prime Minister ordered arrested.”
Henrietta shrank against his shoulder. He was solid and unyielding. “If only you had seen it, Darien—they completely commandeered my debate! I doubt a single person will remember any of my points, and they were rather excellent. I would like a word with those Corresponders myself!”
Darien paused in the low, dark hall and stared at her. The rush light afforded ill light to see by, but she could read his disbelief.
“You spent the night in the watch house,” he said deliberately, “and you are concerned that no one took your point in your debate.”
“All night, was it? No wonder, then. Darien, I need to visit the necessary,” she blurted, cheeks scorching.
“Here?”
“I’m afraid so.” She nodded, squeezing her legs together.
The appalled look on his face as he regarded the enclosed yard behind the building would have made her giggle in other circumstances. It was clear he feared permanent damage to his gleaming top boots.
Setting his jaw, Lord Darien Bales carried Miss Henrietta Wardley-Hines to the clumsy wooden privy and then waited, knee-deep in muck and a combination of fog and morning dew, while she relieved herself.
Oh, what the penny papers would have to say about this escapade did they learn of it, Henrietta thought as he scooped her up again and transported her to the hack waiting by the curb.
The hired coachman sat atop, his neck hunched, his collar turned up against the morning chill. “Uncle Pell.” Henrietta sighed in relief as she climbed into the vehicle and discerned her uncle’s anxious face in the gloom.
The sky held the yellow-gray tint of a smog-choked London morning, while the fetid odor of the river stung her eyes and nose. “Am I to go before the justice of the peace?”
“I took care of it,” Pelton said. “Know the man well.” With dismay, he took in her disheveled gown. “No harm befell you, puss?”
Darien slid his large frame onto the seat next to her, then reached to pull the shade over the window.
He left his arm along the top of the seat as the coach jogged forward.
She tried not to lean back into his solid heat.
She was so tired, and he was angry over the inconvenience of having to spring her from the watch house. He had every right to be.
“I am unharmed,” she assured her uncle. “I was put in the room with the…unfortunate women. Uncle, if you could have heard their stories—they exactly prove the points I was making at my debate, about what happens to women who are prepared for nothing but the keep of a man, then cast out when that man fails them.” She lifted her head. “How did you find me?”
“Lord Darien,” her uncle said. “I heard at the club that someone tipped Pitt off that the Corresponders meant to gather at your debate after being forbidden to meet on their own. Pitt called up the Bishopsgate watch, the City Patrol, the Marshals, and the new Middlesex Justices, too. He’s been looking for a reason to come down on Hardy’s group ever since that damnable closet fire.
Confound it, Hetty, he wants Hardy charged for treason, and there you were, in the midst of it.
A witness said he heard you claiming you were responsible for it all. ”
Henrietta laid her head on the cushioned back of the seat. “Lord Pinochle said that,” she said with bitterness. “Lady Bess and I took away a maid he’d gotten with child, and he’s searching for a way to punish me.”
The cushion flexed, and Henrietta realized she had laid her head on Darien’s arm. She straightened. “Am I to be charged with treason too?”
“I won’t allow it,” her uncle said swiftly.
“You can keep me from hanging, perhaps.” Tears burned her gritty eyes.
“But I could be transported, and the gossip—” She sagged on the rough, cracked seat of the hack, some nobleman’s discarded vehicle.
“Papa will bear it, and Lady Mama, but what will this do to Marsi’s prospects?
” A sob climbed her throat. “I shall never be made a votary of Minerva now. They are women of the highest character and ideals, unsullied in virtue.”
“Lightskirts, was it?” The lump of cloth on the seat beside her uncle moved, and a familiar shock of pepper-brown hair emerged.
“James!” Henrietta cried in relief. “Were you hurt?”
“Only a dick to the knob, miss, and a few lumps to go with it. Wished I’d a seen the man what delivered it,” James growled. “’E’d be missing his stumps about now.”
“Who else was taken?”
“John took a knock when he tried to keep the pig from ’auling you off, and he’s ’ome in the kitchen with a raw steak over ’is eye.
That Lady Bess of yers is nimble on her feet, I tell you—scarpered ’erself out of the way in a trice.
Was you alone, miss, up there on the platform in the thick of it.
In with the Cyprians, were ye!” His laugh turned to a hacking cough.
Henrietta leaned away when a jostle of the carriage made her bump against Darien’s shoulder. “I have not yet made out how Lord Darien knew to come find you, Uncle Pell.”
“James came looking for Charley and found me at Brooks,” Darien said.
James straightened. “Oh, did I?”
“However the way of it, the two of them found me at White’s,” her uncle said, his eyes flickering over Darien. “You’re lucky they did, puss.”
Darien was sitting very close. She fought the longing to curl against him. “You and my brother have become chums, then, if you’ve sponsored him into your club?”
“He has seen fit to lend a hand in a certain…affair of mine,” Darien said. “So I thought I would return the favor and bail you out of gaol.”
“Does this have anything to do with the opera dancer you were with before and he is with now?”
Darien’s brows drew together. The growing light from outside made his eyes look blue-gray. “Does nothing shock you, Henry?”
She leaned her aching head against the seat. Tears of weariness and anger flooded her eyes. “Not after tonight. If you’d heard those women’s stories— I don’t suppose the marquess would use his name to grant them pardon too?”
“You might find it in you to be grateful to the marquess,” Darien said. “With your father gone and Charley missing, it took his name to discharge you. And how will that reflect on Sir Pelton, going against Pitt’s orders?”
He was angry with her. He was ever disapproving of her, Henrietta thought, and he had full call to be so. She had feathers in her head if she meant to send her heart after Lord Darien Bales. Everything with him was negotiation and wiles.
“And if Uncle Pell falls out of favor with Prime Minister Pitt, then he loses his influence in any suits and causes he has promised to aid,” Henrietta retorted.
“Yes, I see why you have so kindly interested yourself in my uncle’s business.
I do not know how to begin to thank you, Lord Darien. Or the marquess.”
A dark look crossed his face. She was behaving badly, provoking him like this, and all because she wanted to lean on his shoulder and cry. These weak impulses were, no doubt, the effect of her sleepless night. She was glad to see the coach turn into Manchester Square.
“Almost home, James, and to our own beds,” she said with feigned cheer. “Poor Aunt Althea will never come down from the boughs, I suppose?”
James threw off the cloak. His smart livery was stained beyond repair, and his quick eyes darted between the two on the seat opposite him. “Ye’ve told ’im, aye? ’E deserves to know.”
Henrietta’s courage suddenly failed her. “Uncle, can you guess who was at my debate? Mr. Equiano himself. Lady Bess promised to introduce me, though of course that never happened. He signed our petition! The one I wrote!”
“Henry,” Darien said, his voice low and quiet as the coach rattled to a stop. “You wrote that you had information for me. About…that matter of mine.”
Yes, and he’d ignored her missive, it would appear.
She studied him, savoring this last opportunity to be close.
His hard look from earlier had turned into his habitual mask.
He had come to rescue her from the watch house, of all places.
Her heart swelled even as her stomach sank.
If he had been angry with her before, he would want nothing to do with her now.
“Celeste sent the child to my keeping,” she said in a quiet voice, gathering her tattered skirts. “She is here, at Hines House. You may send your solicitor to make arrangements with me.”
And she plunged out of the coach so she could no longer see his face.
James hopped out behind them, and the cab rolled away.
Henrietta leaned wearily on her uncle’s arm.
The night soil men went by with their wagon, and down the street, the dairy man set out the day’s milk.
At the house next door, a man in a jacket and trousers, dressed like a tradesman and leaning on the rail to the kitchen stairs, pulled a small notepad out of his pocket and studied the three of them.
She had been an oddity before; she was notorious now. The little scullery maid scrubbing the broad stair before Hines House pulled her bucket of whitewash to the side, and Henrietta summoned a smile of thanks.
“You’re very cool to a man who did you a service, Hetty,” her uncle observed.
“He didn’t help me for my own sake,” Henrietta said. Darien’s swift exit had torn something inside her, and she didn’t care to examine it yet. She stumbled with weariness into the house as Dearbody opened the door. The butler’s mouth dropped open in shock.
“He wanted to know where I’d hidden his child. We’re at daggers drawn, Uncle, ever since he learned the King used Papa’s loan to fund the wars in Mysore.”
Her uncle’s brow furrowed. “He lost his brother in Mysore, lass. Lord Lucien was sent there in the Second War and never heard from since the Treaty of Mangalore. The marquess wants him declared dead so Lord Darien can inherit and take his brother’s estate in hand.
Darien asked me how to defeat the suit.”
“Oh no.” Henrietta stopped short in the tiled foyer. “His brother? No wonder he gave me such a look—he must feel as if we murdered his family. And I was so beastly to him.” She raised a hand to her mouth.
“Now, pet, you can mend your fences later,” her uncle soothed, handing her over to her maid. Duprix choked back a cry at the state of Henrietta’s gown and set her mouth like a fighter on the barricades.
“I can salvage it, ma’mselle, bien s?r,” she clucked, guiding Henrietta to her room. “You were a triumph and all the men adored you, oui?”
Henrietta could not even recall her debate.
The points blurred together in her mind, clouded by the fear and distress over her arrest. She was in disgrace and might be charged with treason.
The cloud would cover her whole family, perhaps also the institutions she supported, and then what would she do?
How would she care for the child she’d taken in?
She would never be admitted to the Minerva Society, never prove herself her mother’s daughter.
She’d be a stain on the Wardley name, a bigger scandal than Aunt Davinia.
And if she were transported to the penal colonies as a traitor to the Crown, she would never see her family again.
They would cast her out completely, with good reason.
At least it was early morning and she didn’t have to face her family yet with the knowledge of how she’d disgraced them.
She had a few hours to rest before the judge opened his office and she could claim her cellmates.
Henrietta shoved her head beneath her goose-down pillow and sobbed until there was nothing left in her.
When sleep claimed her, it was fevered and fretful, haunted by the sight of James’s bruises, the hard lines on the faces of the women in her cell as they shared their painful stories, the stricken expression of Constance Spickey as Henrietta spouted her heretical ideals.
And over and again, the face of a strange man, his mouth gushing blood as he fell toward her, mortally wounded, anguish and reproach in eyes the same shade as Darien’s deepest blue.