Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Henry Jock sat on a stool in the public room of The George, surrounded by a knot of men listening with fascination to his every word.
The heavy exposed beams of the ceiling hung low over the room.
The peat in the hearth puffed smoke and the scent of rich loam, which overpowered the odor of unwashed male bodies.
Joseph caught the end of the tale as he made his way to the bar.
“—and by the time his lordship makes his way up on Blue Diamond, there he sees me, sittin’ in the stands with his lady, just as I said I would be. Thought he would try to strangle me with his bare hands afore the judges could hand out the plate.” The groom grinned.
His audience roared with appreciative laughter at this. Someone slapped Jock on the shoulder and ordered him another pint.
“King o’ Newmarket,” said another, shaking his head. “Shame about the stumps.” He looked morosely at Jock’s legs, dangling crookedly from the stool. “Damned shame.”
“Hasn’t hurt me with the ladies none,” Jock said, accepting the fresh glass of ale.
His audience roared and hooted exclamations of encouragement, accompanied by more back-slapping.
“I thought owners rode their horses in the big races.” Joseph inserted himself into the group without preamble, and with a dose of ill humor he instantly regretted. No sense bringing his blue devils on anyone else.
“Some do.” Jock nodded. “But my Marquess never had a good seat, as like to fall off as cast up his accounts, no matter how smooth the goer. So he promises me a share of the purse, and I takes it.”
Given the size of the prizes for a well-attended race, Jock would be a wealthy man, if he hadn’t gambled all his coin. Or spent it on doctoring.
“Surprised they let you keep your sticks,” Joseph said. “Would have thought the surgeon would have had ’em off you.”
Jock shrugged. “Sawbones thought I was for the earth bath so didn’t choose to squander his time. Turns out I pulled through.” He took a long draught of ale.
The other men moved off to form their own group, uninterested in the conversation now that it had taken a darker turn.
Or unwilling to rub elbows with a man introduced as a baronet, part of the overclass they would mock and complain about amongst themselves.
Joseph’s vault up the social ladder had shut him out of the company of those below.
He took one of the vacated stools next to the groom and stared glumly at the pint the barkeep shoved over the scarred and nocked countertop toward him.
“And I have to ask you to pay for that,” he remarked to Jock. “As you’re currently holding my purse.”
“Whyn’t ye upstairs tuppin’ your lady?”
Joseph scowled into his cup. “She’s not a lightskirt.”
“Doesn’t mean ye can’t have a good tumble. All the better if she likes ye some.”
Joseph tipped a long swallow into his mouth. He couldn’t recall the advice from his university days. Was ale not to be consumed after wine, or was the concern over stronger spirits? He didn’t care if he was sick as a dog tomorrow. He likely deserved it.
He supposed he was to chide Jock for talking about Inez as if she were a loose woman. He dragged a hand across the back of his mouth. “You think she fancies me?”
If he’d seen Inez, standing in that room gloriously nude with only her stockings and garters. A goddess come to earth to strike mortals blind with her beauty.
Or drive them blind with lust. And despair, once they knew they were unworthy.
Jock snorted. “Are ye blind, man? The lures that un’s been casting at you? She wouldn’t hear of going back to London without you. Me, I’d’ve stopped along the way to find a room in broad daylight for the two of us. Or a nice fresh hayloft would do as well.”
Joseph glowered at him. “She’s not—she’s…” Not a lady. She was a servant. She was the daughter of a whore, and he’d found her at a brothel. A rather infamous brothel, truth be known.
So why wouldn’t he simply take what she freely offered?
Any red-blooded man would. The memory of her body gave him a cockstand again.
The dark nipples tipping her generous breasts.
The tuck of her waist and the flare of her hips.
The pocket of dark curls in the glorious V between her legs.
Just the thought of being inside her blotted every other scrap of sense from his mind.
He was going to spend in his breeches from the idea of her. How green could he be?
You’ve never been with a woman, have you? You don’t know what to do.
That wasn’t entirely accurate. He knew how it worked, the mechanics of the act. Of a certain there was pleasure. He could guess that from how much effort his friends and acquaintances expended in getting a female to lift her skirts and permit them that paradise.
It was just he was shite at it, and that was his curse.
“She is a woman under my protection.” He settled on that. One shred of gentlemanly dignity left to him. He was not a Reuben, not that, at least.
Jock laughed again, full-throated. “Coves like thee have been swiving women under their protection since Adam in the garden. Afeared she’s going to spring the shackle on ye?”
“I’m not— I can’t marry her,” Joseph exclaimed. She had made it emphatically clear she did not wish another husband. The scorn on her face was more biting than the teeth of vermin. He wanted nothing but to marry, and she wanted nothing less.
Jock’s face hardened around the nose and mouth. “Aye, marry her ye cannot. Because yer sound Saxon stock and she’s born of a lascar, if I’m not mistaken.”
Joseph glared at him. “That is the least of my concerns. My mother’s family was Portuguese. And converted Jews. I’m no stickler for purity of blood.”
Jock’s expression turned curious. “Jews, you say?”
“Conversos. So, to put a fine point upon it, not practicing Jews for around two hundred years.”
That was not to say his grandmother had not held her secrets.
Joseph recalled nights she lit candles when it was not a holy day he knew of, no Christian saint’s fast. He heard the prayers she would sometimes mutter that were not in Portuguese, and he’d seen the silver amulet engraved with a five-sided star that she kept tucked in a wooden box in her wardrobe.
But his mother had stood in full view of the Anglican church swearing her vows to love and obey and honor Jonas Illingworth her whole life long, and if she ever regretted departing from her family’s heritage to follow the man who held her heart, Joseph had never seen sign of it.
Jock tilted his head to the side. His eyes were an uncanny blue. “Then it’s as yer a swell and she’s a blowen, and there’s no mixing of kind.”
“It’s not because she’s a servant,” Joseph snapped. “Well, in part it is, because she works in my house and I can’t—I won’t be that man.”
The kind of man who thought a woman was prey, or the lower classes were his to command.
Joseph had grown up elbow to elbow with the sons of miners and carters and butchers and grooms, and he knew those boys were built of the same matter as he or Walter Robings of Rosecraddoc Manor, all of them made of blood and guts and bone.
It wasn’t the common opinion of his class—he’d learned that at Oxford—but it was ingrained into him. One more reason Susannah Pettigrew and her Quaker beliefs had held such appeal for him.
Susannah Pettigrew, his last failure and warning.
“She fancies ye, and ye fancy ’er,” Jock mused. “So the only reason to keep from making the beast w’ two backs is ye can’t provide for her after.”
A thread of bitterness in the man’s tone made Joseph look closely at him.
They sat undisturbed in their corner of the bar as guests came and went, travelers from the passing coaches stepping in for a moment of warmth and ease, locals gathering for rest and gossip.
The two sat slightly apart, and suddenly the well of quiet around them became a kind of confession.
“I can provide for her,” Joseph said, prickling. “I’m a bloody baronet now, didn’t you know? I don’t intend to saddle her with a babe, but I can look after her well enough.”
“Then have yer fun without leaving her a babe.” Jock said this with the confidence of a man who knew well the pathways of pleasure, and indulged in them regularly. But there was that edge of bitterness again.
“That’s why you’re not shackled yourself,” Joseph guessed. “You couldn’t provide for her.”
Jock winced. His pain was raw, and recent. “She swore she could live on the little I could offer. But I knew she wouldn’t be happy, not once all her fine friends’d cut ’er. And her family’ud feel the strain too. ’Twas asking too much.”
Perhaps he ought to have let the woman decide that, Joseph thought, but didn’t say.
Amaranthe had been prepared to take Malden Grey when she thought he was the bastard son of a duke, doubted he would ever be called to the bar, and might very well have to support him on her work as a copyist, the way she’d supported Joseph.
Only the stupendous surprise of discovering the marriage lines Mal’s dead mother had always sworn existed had turned Amaranthe’s straw to spun gold, making the bastard the Duke of Hunsdon.
Not quite the same leap as lowly tutor Joseph Illingworth becoming Sir Joseph of Penwellen, but in the same vein.
“I thought you had a position with the Earl of Renwick,” Joseph said.
“It’s the Countess of Calenberg pays my salary. But I’ve spent a deal of time at Renwick House after her ladyship’s niece wed the earl.”
Joseph tried to remember. All the titles he’d encountered since Amaranthe skipped her way to the highest echelons of British society had frankly gotten muddled in his head.
Renwick was an odd one—seemed a very deliberate, reserved man.
Joseph had thought him an arrogant ass until Amaranthe whispered, at a breakfast she’d hosted one afternoon, that the man’s stiff demeanor was compensation for a clubfoot and he didn’t speak much because of his stammer.
The Countess of Calenberg was odder still.
Her husband had been the count of some tiny Germanic principality that no longer existed, given the near-constant wars on the Continent.
She lived like an eccentric in a big house in London, merry as the day was long, sharing her house with outcast women who had artistic sensibilities and collecting servants who wouldn’t be hired anywhere else.
Witness Henry Jock, who without the patronage of an eccentric countess would be on the street with his beggar’s bowl like so many other poor souls of London who had lost their legs or their eyes or their wits.
“The girl was a maid in Renwick’s household,” Joseph guessed.
Jock’s mouth twisted. “The earl’s sister.”
Joseph blinked. “The devil you say. So his lordship threatened to kill you?”
“He doesn’t know of it. No one does, saving her and I. And she won’t speak of it.”
“Cut you off when she was finished? That’s a cold end.”
“She’d have run away with me if I’d let her. Demanded it, actually. But what have I to give ’er? Told her so, broke her heart, and took m’self away instead.”
Joseph contemplated the tangle of emotion on the other man’s face. “And here you are, counseling me to have my way with Inez.”
The other shrugged. “There’s hell to pay after, to be sure, but to have her? Why’d you deny yourself that? If you want her, that is.”
Oh, Joseph wanted Inez. He wanted her with an intensity that had taken him off guard.
He wasn’t built like other men; he’d learned that in university.
They could drop their breeches for any pretty face and not see the girl again after.
Joseph required some sense of attachment to his partner before the blood could rise.
He needed to feel she was a woman he could admire, possibly share a future with, and then the little head followed the lead of the larger.
Until it came to the actual act. There, he was rubbish. And he didn’t want Inez to know that.
He hadn’t known how much she riled his senses until he’d seen that eel Wigsby advancing on her. She was Inez. Bearer of trays. Baker of delicious bread. A proud, beautiful, prickly woman he could seem to offend just by looking at her.
He held her in esteem. He cared about her welfare. She stirred his heart and his senses together. That was why, when she tore off her gown and stood before him as perfect as God made her, he’d wanted to dive at her, bear her back to bed, and bury himself in her softness.
But. There were so many buts. So many risks that joining with her—or attempting such—would create a rend he couldn’t repair.
You’ve never been with a woman. You don’t know what to do.
“Tell me how not to leave her with a babe,” Joseph said.
Before this night, Joseph had only known one way to find pleasure with a woman. By the time he’d bought and finished another round of ales with Henry Jock, he knew at least five.