Chapter 18 #3
“I am aware that your dear baronet is in straits, Mrs. Da Costa. I was more in Reuben’s pockets than you know. I can put a significant down payment on a contract should he wish to sell me that land. And I can guarantee full payment in time."
A shopkeeper, buying up part of a local estate? Treen was indeed anxious to climb the ladder to gentility.
“Good day, Mr. Treen. Thank you for the great honor—” the words were ash in her mouth— “of introducing me to your friends.”
He had paraded her before his mother and friend so they might shred her like a roomful of cats handed a plump mouse. He had meant to show her her place.
A woman who, in the market, could command the respect and best prices from the local tradeswomen and other servants.
But never, never a woman who would gain the respect of the genteel.
“I hope I might bring my mother to call at Penwellen soon, Mrs. Da Costa. I will live for the moment that I may again drink in your beauty.”
“The beauty of a Blackamoor? You do indeed have exotic tastes, Mr. Treen.” She was too well-mannered to slam the door, but she thought about it.
Fury gripped her in its claws as she hastily made the short walk to the Bull’s Head.
She saw the looks cast her way, curiosity about the newcomer.
Her face would always make her stand out.
She could never be accepted here. There would always be those who looked past the color of her face to the person behind it; Amaranthe had been one, Joseph with her, the ladies of Dark Lane, the staff at Penwellen.
But there would always be the Mrs. Treens of the world, ready to scratch at any interloper they deemed unworthy.
She had made herself unworthy by allowing herself to become a kept woman. And she had broken her sacred promise to her mother.
Jock sat at the counter of the pub, as usual surrounded by admirers. He beckoned to Inez, and she went, ready to beg her to take her from here at once.
Jock was in the same position she was. Some thought him less than a man because his body had been broken. Some admired him all the same. Men wanted to be him; women pursued him.
But Joseph had also hinted why Jock was absenting himself from London. He’d meddled with an earl’s sister, and class was a line lovers did not cross without repercussions.
Her darling mam?e had loved across borders, falling in love with a foreign sailor. And following him to her ruin and death.
“Down from Plymouth, I see,” Inez said by way of greeting.
Jock took the pint of ale the barkeep set before him, one likely supplied by an admirer.
“Met a gentry mort and her cove with such a Canterbury story. Fresh home from a flight abroad, aren’t they, a fortune hunter, he, and an honest woman, she.
Wed a brace of years ago, quite a rumpus as he snaffled her out from the nose of her muckworm of a father.
Now the mort wants to mend the fences she broke, with the pater and a few others she says she’s done wrong. ”
He stared at Inez as if this intelligence should mean something to her. She had the creeping feeling, a damp cold snaking from her toes and working its way up her legs like a fog, that it did.
“This lady wouldn’t be the daughter of a lord of my acquaintance,” Inez said. The world was not that small. The peerage of Britain was not that small. Genteel daughters ran away from controlling parents all the time, didn’t they?
“Depends,” Jock answered. “The mort is on the lookout for her old abigail. Dark-skinned article, foreign born. Meant to part on amicable terms, but didn’t make the last club, as the tide waits for no man.
The mort says she would much desire—them’s her words, they are—to ask the maid about something she might have in her possession. ”
Inez didn’t ask how Jock had found out the connection.
The admiration he received everywhere he went meant people confided in him all the time, sharing details of their lives as if they knew him, and he in return ought to know them.
There were dark-skinned maids in service across Britain, true enough, but not so many that Jock could not come to some reasonable deductions, given a few hints.
She had no doubt he had met Wigsby’s errant, married daughter, now returned to England.
And the daughter would be searching out Inez for the same reasons as her father.
The reckoning had come. Inez felt a heavy chain clamping to the iron collar around her throat. They didn’t indenture people to the colonies anymore, did they? Not after the upstart Americans had begun a rebellion.
No, what they would do is throw her into the hulks, the broken ships that floated in the Thames off Woolwich.
London’s prisons being severely overcrowded and a place needed for the excess, Parliament had decided to turn a ship captured from the French Navy into a floating penitentiary, and now there was a new way to store society’s unwanted out of sight.
Did she go to Plymouth, it was likely Inez would go from town straight to prison. Or the gallows.
But if she went, she could lay rest, at last, to the ghosts of her past. Wigsby would leave off hunting her; he would have to quarrel with his daughter to get his jewels back.
And Joseph would never learn what Inez had done.
She had known she was leaving. That her time here was done. Fitting that it would end with a final accounting for her crimes.
It was time to pay the devil his due.
She looked into Jock’s steady eyes. “You will take me?”
He nodded, once. Excellent discretion, for a groom. No wonder a marquess had depended on him. No wonder an earl’s daughter had thrown her heart after him.
“I don’t wish to tell the others. Especially Joseph.”
He drew a finger across his lips to indicate a seal.
She closed her eyes and drew in a breath. This could be the end of everything. She could be headed for absolution, or the hangman’s noose.
“I need to collect something from the house.”
Again he nodded.
She took his glass from his hand and tipped it down her throat. The ale was warm, the foam bitter.
“How soon do you think we should leave?”