Prologue
Rule One:
Never Mistake a Boy’s Promise for a Man’s Vow
That last night, she found him as expected, seated before a cast-off pianoforte tucked into a dank parlor in the servants’ quarters.
Her mother, considered eccentric for her thoughtful attention to her staff, had sent the piece belowstairs when it was replaced, believing everyone needed a bit of joy to soften the daily toil of life.
Persephone halted in the doorway, uncertain, the previous months bringing a faltering tenor to their relationship.
Where before they’d torn through the stone-walled fields and heathered moors of Yorkshire, playing at smugglers and highwaymen, with scraped knees, stolen apples in hand, and all the wild confidence of childhood, now, at fifteen, something had changed.
A subtle vibration of awareness traveled between them, one she wasn’t sure how to manage.
Laurence Thorne, son of her father’s groom, had grown taller than she was—a first—during the winter her family spent in London, gaining two stone of lean muscle, while she remained tall, slender, and stubbornly girlish, with no figure to speak of.
She could see from his dejected posture, his long body dappled in shifting dust motes, that he’d had another row with his father.
His fingers trailed lightly along the keys, this gift one he hid from the world.
Years ago, she’d shown him what her music tutor, Mrs. Armington, had taught her, and he’d taken to playing with improbable skill, racing beyond anything she’d hoped to achieve by keen ear alone.
With the ghost of a smile, he glanced at her. Hair the color of peat moss hanging overlong across his brow. “You can come in, Perce, I’m alone,” he said, giving the strands a negligent swipe.
As always, he’d known she was there.
She would never deny him, because she was Perce to no one else.
He was only half visible in the faint illumination, his features coming into view the closer she got.
High cheekbones, a full lower lip—something she’d only recently begun to notice—and eyes so dark they seemed black until light touched them, turning them a molten brown.
The bruise slashing across his cheekbone was unmistakable when he dipped his head over the keys.
“Laurie,” she gasped, moving in to brace her hands on the pianoforte’s scarred top.
He finished the final chord of Beethoven’s sonata without comment, though the ending note was brutal.
“I’m going to tell my father this time,” she whispered, wanting to touch him but knowing, with that lingering pulse of hesitation, that strange new warning, not to.
He reacted before a breath had passed and grasped her hand, his gaze hard, another change. The hearthfire at the other end of the room crackled and spit. “Oh, no, you won’t. I don’t need a duke’s daughter, my employer’s daughter, saving me from my own father.”
So stubborn. Cursing softly, she struggled against his hold, but he didn’t let go.
“You should watch your language,” Laurie murmured, his thumb drawing slow circles on her wrist, his glorious eyes pinning her in place.
“Sounding like a dockside pickpocket won’t go over well when you’re being paraded around town in search of a husband.
Society will kindly slice you to ribbons if you step outside the tight lines they’ve drawn.
Truth be told, it’s reaching the point where being seen with me so often won’t do you any good. ”
She yanked on her arm, and this time, he released her. “I’m not marrying some preening lord, some dandy in French silk. I’m going to be old and alone, like Aunt Agnes. I’ll write surrounded by a hundred cats!”
Maybe she wanted to sound like a dockside pickpocket, like Laurie. Despite his harsh upbringing, he was a genuine person in a world of charlatans.
He sighed and trailed his fingers along the keys. The agile melody echoed about the chamber. “Writing. Your book of rules again, is it?” At least he didn’t mention the felines she fed in the stable every morning, because he took over the job when she was in London.
Persephone dragged her gaze from the sight of his corded forearms tensing beneath his tattered cotton sleeve. The mix of feelings he inspired—friendship, curiosity, admiration, wonder—bewildered her even as they drew her in. “It’s a parody. Just a bit of fancy to pass the time.”
“It’s an indictment, Perce, one sure to be condemned, and you along with it, if that pamphlet ever sees the light of day. If a servant reads it and decides to rat you out, you’ll be…”
Shoulders slumping, he squeezed the bridge of his nose, leaving the rest unsaid.
He worried that her impulsivity would ruin her. Worried she was destroying the “grand opportunities” she’d been granted as the daughter of a peer, when those opportunities were weights dragging her under.
Men, even low-born ones, couldn’t understand; they were free.
“I lock the folio up at night.” Rolling the edge of her cuff between her finger and thumb, a tell they both knew meant she was uneasy, she backed up three steps to perch on the rounded arm of a settee that had seen better days in the late 1700s.
She wondered how Laurie had come to be so wise without one day of proper schooling.
“It’s merely footnotes, a memoir of sorts. ”
He grunted, unwilling to debate the issue.
Anyway, she knew what he’d say: why hide it away if it’s harmless?
Her pet project might have started as a diary, but somewhere along the way, as she’d gotten older and been invited to real affairs, she’d begun chronicling her world.
A young woman, attractive but not beautiful, quiet and unseen in parlor corners recording the aristocratic matchmaking, the chinwag, the negotiations, the deals.
“I don’t use names,” she whispered, fiddling with her sleeve.
She was dressed for bed, in a night rail and wrapper, covered from throat to toe, worn slippers included. Yet he gave her a lasting look, part of this strange recognition between them, that made her feel, once again, decidedly funny.
And not entirely in a bad way.
“They’ll know who they are the second they read it, and you’ll be doomed. The line between success and disaster is thin as thread, Perce.” He tapped C sharp, twice. “I might not be here to—”
“Stop,” she whispered, covering her ears.
He swiveled toward her, revealing the extent of the damage his father’s fists had done this time. Her stomach bottomed out at his somber expression. She knew what was coming, and the unselfish part of her realized he was right. Leaving was best.
But the part that loved him—
Laurie scooted forward on the bench, doing something he hadn’t since the previous summer.
Grasping her hand, he linked their fingers.
His skin was warm, calloused, the vein at his wrist pulsing.
Laurence Thorne’s friendship was the only certain thing in a life that didn’t fit her, one she feared never would.
She wanted to hang onto this moment, and him, forever.
“I have a cousin, the bloke I told you about.” His dark eyes were pleading, begging her to understand.
“Despite starting with less than me even, he’s doing well in London.
Building a kingdom in Spitalfields, organizing a crew he calls the Rookery Rebels.
He needs men he can trust. He needs a mind for maths to expand his business interests, and why I have one, I don’t know, but I do. ”
“Jackson—” She struggled to remember his cousin’s last name.
“Yes, that’s it, Jackson Dorsey.” Laurie sighed in relief, his smile returning. Perhaps he thought she was happy about this—and she would be, she could be—if it made him happy. If getting away from Yorkshire was what he must do to survive.
Although she would be miserable.
Persephone squeezed his hand, her throat closing.
No tears, she silently vowed. “He can trust you more than anyone in England to manage his affairs. You’re better than Hawkins at calculations, and he’s the estate manager.
Why, he came to you last month to correct an error, the silly oaf.
I so wanted to tell my father, tell him to hire you, but you wouldn’t let me. ”
“Perce,” Laurie said, his voice the texture of the gravel lining the estate drive.
“When my mother passed, and she told me who my father was, there was nowhere else to go but to him. I’d gotten in enough trouble in the city, with no family left.
No choices left. Yorkshire seemed like a dream, and in ways, I mean, it was.
Fresh air. No one chasing me down dark alleys.
No more doing things I hated, illegal things, to put food on the table.
” His gaze caught hers, troubled and steady, his dark lashes so long they threw tiny shadows across his skin. “And you. There’s always been you.”
He swallowed hard, his watery gaze dropping to the floor.
“But he’s getting worse. The drinking’s worse, while I’m getting stronger.
Maybe angrier, too. We’re on a course to tragedy if I stay.
My future isn’t here, we both know that.
” Then he shrugged, laughing softly. “I’m not even very good with the horses. ”
Persephone reached for him at the same time he reached for her. Her head fit into the notch between his neck and shoulder as if the spot had been created just for her. “You’re horrible with them. When has there ever been a groom frightened of his own beasts?”
“Cautious isn’t frightened,” he whispered into the night.
For long seconds, they rocked and laughed together, his breath a warm gust across the crown of her head. The tick of the mantel clock and the faint pop of embers in the hearth were the only sounds in their world.
“If I had someone to stay for, besides you, I would,” he finally said, his arms coming fully around her. “But you’ll soon have your own posh life, a place I can’t inhabit. That we’ve grown up together is enough, our secret. We need to accept that, be thankful for it, live on it.”
She drew back slowly, though his arms tightened as if he felt the separation as keenly as she did.
In the weak candlelight, his bruised features looked older than fifteen.
A little wrecked already, which seemed desperately unfair.
He was changing faster than she was, maturing into another person, and she could do nothing to catch up.
“We’ll be friends forever, won’t we?” Persephone asked, studying him with the full force of her attention. She knew his face better than anyone’s, every shadow and shift, every determined line. Surely the truth would show itself.
For a moment, Laurie said nothing, giving her access she’d not have again for years.
Then his thumb made a tender sweep across her palm, gentle as a promise.
“Forever,” he promised.
And this was where he lied.