Chapter 35
Owen’s head throbbed the next morning as he stood on a box before a sea of factory workers, their scabbed and dirty faces looking wearily up at him.
They had come to work, even as the newsies waved the morning paper announcing one of the biggest scandals in London history.
The entire city was in a frenzy over the front-page article explaining that the “hysteria” was in fact arsenic poisoning caused by the parrot green–shaded textiles produced by Lord Brackley’s factory.
Owen scanned the workers’ expressions. Most of them were young, too young to be on a factory floor.
Their clothes were dirty, their skin abscessed from handling the arsenic.
Many of them were coughing, and a few had the same glazed-eyed look of confusion as Mrs. Iverson, while others appeared close to vomiting.
These women and children, for the most part, had been allowing themselves to be poisoned because they had had no other choice.
Because a greedy man had chosen riches and satisfying his investors over their health.
Because they were desperate, and they were considered disposable.
“I do not believe it was profit your brother was after when he started the factory,” the Dove had said the night before, having arrived at Owen’s townhouse with both Mr. and Mrs. Jones well past the midnight hour.
She had stood in shadow, her half-veil concealing her eyes, and a frisson of danger had swept up Owen’s spine.
“I have interviewed the doctor who tended to your mother the night she died. He is retired now, but it was his private opinion that your mother perished from ingesting increasingly large doses of arsenic. For some reason, your brother blames you for her death, and has therefore set out to poison your name and reputation by using the same substance that poisoned your mother.”
“He has failed,” Owen had said harshly. “I am sharing his name and his role in the factory with the London papers tomorrow. He deserves to be incarcerated like the women he poisoned.”
“If that is what you wish to do,” the Dove had murmured, “but might I suggest that he would consider that a success? He wishes for you to attempt to exonerate yourself. He trusts that it will make you appear a fool, since many will not believe that you suddenly have a convenient half-brother to take the blame. At the same time, his need for you to know that it was he who outwitted you, he who ruined you, and he who avenged your mother’s death, will be satisfied.
However, if you are willing to take the blame for the factory, I believe we can draw him out.
I know his kind.” Her lips had thinned. “If you do not follow his script, he will feel that his vendetta is incomplete.”
“I will do anything to end this.”
So here he stood, his head splitting just from the fumes of the place, and said, “You are all wondering, so I will be blunt. The newspaper articles are right. I am closing the factory, effective immediately.”
A little boy’s lower lip trembled. A girl cast her face down, her scabbed fingers twisting together, and even though the factory smelled and the ventilation was horrid with the high windows closed, Owen knew this job was all that stood between many of them and starvation.
“I am so sorry.” He could barely speak past the lump in his throat.
“You ent the man who hired us,” a woman called from a few rows deep.
“No,” he said hoarsely, “but I am taking ownership of the factory today. Have there been any deaths here?”
Several heads dropped. “Ten people so far, my lord,” a young woman said, her voice wavering.
Ten people had died, and the factory not yet a year old. Owen felt as if he had been delivered a blow. He would find his monstrous half-sibling and make him pay for the lives he had ruined if it was the last thing he ever did.
“You will all be released with four months of wages and free visits to the clinic until the toxin clears from your body. The family members of those deceased will receive further compensation.”
The workers stared at him for a moment and then glanced warily amongst themselves.
“Do ye jest?” a child asked. He could not have been more than nine.
“No.” Owen gestured forward the three solicitors he had brought with him. “Please line up. They will take down your name, and you will be paid one month’s wage now, and on the first of the following three months. You simply need to arrive outside the building.”
On the way out the door he stopped to speak to the factory manager. “Clear out the office space and send me all records, books, and correspondence within. Once the workers have left, seal off this building.”
Ivy was waiting for Owen outside the factory, and when he appeared he looked haggard and heartbroken. She hurried forward and took his arm. “Are you all right?”
He jerked when he saw her, his face flashing with panic. “What are you doing here? You are not supposed to be here. You are supposed to be home, safe.”
“Someone needs to keep you safe.”
“Ivy, I beg of you. Please go home. I cannot lose you, and I cannot concentrate with you here.”
“We are safer together.”
He waited for her to leave, but she only stood there, staring back. “You are not leaving unless I throw you over my shoulder and carry you, are you?”
“What a scandal that would make!”
Owen gave her a desperate look. “As you are giving me no choice but to acquiesce, I will remind you that if you die, all that is good in me will die, too.”
The stark words were like a hot spear to her heart. Did he truly feel like that? She glanced behind him to the dirty factory. “How was it?”
“It is miserable in there. My brother must truly hate me in order to injure so many innocent people.”
“His mind is not sound, Owen. He was the bastard child of a union between a murderous marquess and a viscount’s wife.
Both of his parents were noble, and yet he ended up in poverty with nothing and no one to love him.
That, combined with a sickness he inherited from his father, made him do this. Not you. Never you.”
Owen paused on the cobblestone street, gently tugging her to the side to allow other pedestrians to pass. He scrubbed a hand over his unshaven jaw. “I know we must remain in public today in hopes he will approach me, but I wish you would go home.”
“No.”
He sighed and brought her so close that if they were not already betrothed, it would have been scandalous. “I have something I must tell you, and it cannot wait any longer.”
“If you ask me to go home one more time, I vow to—”
“I love you.”
Ivy’s words failed, her lips parting and her breath coming out on a short exhale.
“I have loved you for longer than I could even admit to myself. You are good and kind, clever and courageous. You are the sunshine to my storm clouds. Everyone on the estate adores you, including my sisters. Do you want to know what Octavia said to me that first day in the schoolroom, when I asked each of the girls how their governess made them feel?”
Ivy nodded.
“She told me she felt loved, Ivy. That little girl’s mother will never love her, her father was incapable of the emotion, and I was not there for the first three years of her life.
But you were there, and in a matter of weeks you made her feel wanted when no one else in her life had.
You loved those girls, and they felt it.
I feel it.” He cupped her chin, his gloves cool against her warm skin.
“You are everything to me. To us. I vow that until my dying breath, I will love and cherish you, Ivy Bennett.”
Ivy pressed her fingers to her mouth before she dropped her hand and squealed, “I love you, too!” She threw her arms around his neck and did not care who saw. “You are who I want, Owen. Only you.”
He kissed her, a fast, hot touch on her lips, and then dragged his mouth to her ear. “I want you to tell me that you love me again tonight when I have you pressed against the wall and your legs spread.”
Ivy made a low noise in her throat, instantly warming at the sensuous, dark promise in his voice. “I will tell you tonight. And tomorrow night. And every night. I will never stop loving you.”
“Even when I am grumpy?”
“Especially then,” she said, skating a quick kiss over his jaw. His hand flexed on her arm and his eyes darkened.
“Mayhap we can go home now and—”
“I think not,” a flat voice said.
Owen went unnaturally still, and it took Ivy a moment to spot the muzzle of a pistol nudging his side.
“Is this a robbery in broad daylight?” Owen drawled, not letting on that he knew his assailant.
Ivy’s eyes flickered over the man. Although the brim of his top hat was pulled low and he had grown a beard, she would never forget the flat, emotionless voice from the night he had shot Owen.
It was easy to see how Oscar had fooled so many people.
Up close, he would never pull the wool over the eyes of someone who knew the viscount intimately, but from a distance their features and mannerisms were similar enough, even if his nose was a bit narrower and his eyebrows thinner.
In the daylight, she could see that he even had Owen’s eye color, albeit a lighter shade of green.
“Or are you the man who has tried to kill me multiple times?” Owen continued. He widened his eyes at her, and in them she saw a desperate plea for her to run, but they were partners now. She was not going anywhere.
“Tried to kill you?” Oscar’s tone was patronizing as he arched a brow. “Do you believe I am so incompetent that I would have missed twice if I had not intended to?”
“The gun wound nearly finished me.”
The strangest sense of ludicrousness overcame Ivy as the two brothers conversed on the street in full view of people walking by as if they were old friends, and not as if one of them was holding a pistol on the other.
“That was an error,” Oscar admitted. “I meant to wound you, but I grew so angry that I nearly made my mark.”