Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Aloud scream pierced the night, and both Florence and Lord George jumped.
“What was that?” Florence whispered, her fingers unconsciously twisting in her lap. They had spent almost an hour in silence, but now the mob seemed to be moving closer once more.
To think, she had come to this grey and dreary country to get away from such things.
“. . . safe here.” Lord George had spoken quietly. “As long as we do not make our presence known, there is every chance we will survive the night.”
“Su-survive the night?” Florence rose from her chair, unable to remain still for a moment longer. “Dio, I cannot believe this: I came to this dockyard for one simple purpose, and now I am trapped in this godforsaken room with a – ”
“I hope I am not about to be offended,” Lord George spoke lazily, lounging now on the bed once more.
She tried to keep her wandering eyes away from him, for each and every time they rested on him, her heart seemed to twist uncomfortably.
“When do you think we will be able to leave?”
A dry laugh echoed from behind her as she peered through the cracked window. “What am I, some sort of mystic? I know naught of these types of things, Miss Capria, this is not the sort of company I generally keep!”
Florence bit her lip. She would surely miss another opportunity to get to Italy, and then it would be another day here, in London. In England. In the location of her failure.
“Why are you so frantic to return to Italy, anyway?”
She turned around, skirts swishing, to see Lord George was staring at her with a piercing look.
“You murmured something – something I did not entirely catch, but it seemed pertinent, when the fight broke out.” His dark eyes were boring into her, and Florence found, somehow, she did not mind the intrusion.
There was nowhere else to sit, so Florence returned to the solitary chair beside the bed, careful not to trip over the long legs sprawled across the floor.
“Well,” she said quietly, trying not to look at him, “I left Italy two years ago. Now I would like to go back.”
If she had thought he would be happy with that, she was wrong.
“Come now,” said George, smiling up at her, and trying to ignore the pull of his loins that were growing ever stronger now he saw the curve of her collarbone, the sparkle in her eye. “There must be a more interesting story than that.”
He watched as she caught her breath, saw the struggle across her brow, and marvelled at the delicate beauty of a woman who did not know her own power. Why, if she but leaned over a foot, they could –
“My mother, as you know, is a . . . cortigiana.” Her voice seemed to flutter rather than speak, it was so soft.
George shifted across a few inches on the bed.
“When I turned twenty-one, I decided I no longer want to be a part of such a household. Mafia, you understand. Being your own mistress, as a woman, is not highly regarded in Italy. In some areas, it is a little more dangerous.”
Florence – Miss Capria, he must consider her Miss Capria – smiled fleetingly.
“I do love my mother, signore, you must not think that I do not. But I wanted to see more of the world than the streets of our city, and she had no wish to come with me. I had seen enough violence, enough fighting, to last a lifetime. You cannot imagine what it is like to live in a town controlled by the Mafia. I wanted to leave.”
George tried not to frown. A mother who would just let her daughter wander the world? “She did not attempt to stop you?”
A bitter laugh, a shake of the head, the glint of the firelight in her eye. “No. No, I think my mother had been waiting a few years for the conversation we had that night, and it came as no surprise to her that I was ready to be beyond her keeping.”
“Mothers and daughters,” said George quietly. “Fathers and sons. It often happens that way.”
A spark of understanding passed between them, and George felt a heady tug below his navel.
“I went to France, at first,” Florence had continued, pulling her pelisse from her shoulders and laying it carefully on the back of the chair. “I spent six months there, working as a lady’s maid. I was a little coarse for the French – ”
“Aren’t we all?”
“ – but I was not happy. I had heard such stories,” and now a smile appeared, and George started at its loveliness.
The tired lines, the despondent air: both had completely disappeared, and the Florence Capria now looking at him would not have been out of place at a debutante ball.
“Stories of London, of the Regent’s London, of writers and poets and gentlemen and dances – oh, you could not imagine my hopes! ”
“I think you will find I can,” said George, heavily. “Remember, I was born here. I was raised on the same stories you were fed on, and I can tell you from my own experience: it is all true.”
Florence smiled sadly, almost with a pitying look.
“Perhaps for you, my lord. For the rest of us, it is nothing but hard work, struggle, and despondency. I had been here a twelvemonth when I realised that, despite my mother’s harsh words, she had spoken the truth.
I was not happy in France, and I was not happy in London. ”
George stared at her, compassion filling him. “You are a woman who has travelled the world in search of happiness; that is more than many of us do. You are braver than most.”
“Braver, perhaps. And stupido.” Florence rolled her eyes. “The idea that I will be returning home fills me with joy, but the fact is that I will never be able to admit to my mother, the great cortigiana of my town, that she was right.”
He frowned. “Why not?”
“She died,” replied Florence lightly. “Almost a year ago, but the letter only now reached me, it had been waiting for me in Paris, but I did not return. So now I return to the Italy of my family to rebuild my life, without family whatsoever. Though I suppose it removes the burden of admitting I was wrong.”
“No child likes to admit that to a parent,” agreed George. His feet were mere inches from hers. If he just stretched out . . .
“And no parent will ever admit it to their child,” she said quietly. “It is one of the things I will always attempt to do, if I am ever blessed with children.”
George’s imagination was suddenly overcrowded with images of small, dark haired children; children with his eyes, nattering away in Italian. What was he thinking – was he mad? How was this woman, a woman he had met but two hours ago, having such power over him?
“I am sorry you did not find what you wanted here,” he found himself saying.
Florence looked up at him, her eyebrows puckered together slightly as though attempting to understand him. “Thank you,” she said finally. “I am not alone, I think, in finding my life to be unlike the one I had wanted.”
He shrugged nonchalantly – or as nonchalantly as he was able. “You are perceptive, Miss Capria.”
“Call me Florence.”
Three words; three short words that seemed to echo in the tiny room for seconds afterwards. George found his mouth had dropped open slightly, and a warm blush and, he was astonished to see, a smile were creeping over her face.
“I beg your pardon?” He said, his voice unusually deep.
She laughed, and it was a genuine laugh now, perhaps the first one he had heard uttered from her lips, and it stirred his loins painfully once more.
“It seems ridiculous that I am permitted to call you ‘Lord George’, and you must call me ‘Miss Capria’. My name is Florence: I think it is bellissima, and so I see no reason why you should not use it.”
George swallowed. You are out of your depth here, he told himself. There is something happening; something you do not understand, something beyond your ken.
But he could not look away from her, and he found himself hoping that whatever it was, it did not stop.
“Florence, then. You are perceptive in seeing that my life is, perhaps, not what I had hoped for.” George struggled to keep his mind away from Honoria, and found suddenly that it was no longer a struggle.
The pain that had seared his heart was dull.
“But then, it is not unusual for people of my rank to go through life just making the motions.”
“Making the motions?”
George smiled, and Florence answered his smile. “Pretending.”
“Ah.” She nodded. “That is not a thing the Italians, we do well.”
A moment passed between them: a moment of knowing, of knowledge, of understanding.
George’s breath caught in his throat as he connected with the most beautiful woman, and he could acknowledge it now, he had ever met.
He wanted her. He could no longer deny it, and if she had been willing he would have dragged her off that chair and pulled her down with him into that bed, small as it was, and –
“So who was this woman?”
Her words cut across his thoughts like a knife, and it seared his heart. “Woman?”
She looked at him with wide eyes. “Do not attempt to hide it from me, George. It is quite obvious you were hurt before. Tell me about her.”
Though his thoughts had often wandered to Honoria, it felt slightly unnatural to consider her when such a woman as Florence was before him. “Honoria? Why, she was a girl I knew from childhood. A woman I thought I loved, until she decided that she did not consider me in such a regard.”
The words held little pain as he said them aloud, like drawing poison from a wound. He shivered slightly. “I heard she married and was widowed, but that was the last I heard of her. I think, deep in my heart, I had hoped . . .”
It felt almost childish now he thought about it.
“That she would return to you?” Florence’s words were gentle, and George smiled.
“It was a foolish thought, and it did not happen. And perhaps that was right. I am certainly not the man that loved her five years ago.”
She was staring at him as though she was seeing him again for the first time. “And yet, you suffered.”