Chapter 21 #2
“I would do it over again if it helped her leave your house,” Inez said. “You treated her like your property, not a person in her own right.”
“She is my property!” Wigsby roared. “So is this.” He lunged for the table, pushing his daughter aside, and grabbed the jewels up in their silken cloth.
He looked every inch like the spoiled bully he was, and did not even spare a glance for Priscilla, who was caught in the arms of her husband, and then pushed behind him for protection.
Wigsby’s beady, bulging gaze fell on Inez. “And I won’t charge you with thievery if you come with me quietly.”
“You dare,” Joseph said.
Inez shuddered. “I won’t.”
“Then I’ll have you taken up by the watch like the—”
“I wonder,” Joseph said, advancing with his sword before him, “that you berate me for my affections, your lordship—” He made the address sound like a slur— “when I, if I am not mistaken, found you lately in the environs of Dark Lane.”
Wigsby froze like a hare that had been spotted by the hound.
Pierre’s brows rose. “Dark Lane? La vache!”
“What Lane?” Priscilla questioned. “Where?”
“In fact—” Joseph continued his advance— “I have it on authority from one of the Vestals of the house that she makes regular accommodations for you. Rather irregular accommodations, truth be known.”
Wigsby’s labored breath became audible in the utter stillness of the room. Inez held back a laugh so she might not spoil Joseph’s attack. He was so very magnificent.
“You…you slander me. That is a hanging offense also.”
“Not if it’s true,” Joseph said, his voice smooth as butter.
“And I am told many of the ladies of Dark Lane can attest to the…vigor and imagination of your attentions. I am sure they would not mind sharing such information in a public venue. In court, mayhap, or with a satirist for The London Magazine?”
Sweat rolled from the brow of his lordship’s wig. His fingers curled like claws around the bag of jewels. He pawed at his waistcoat as if seeking air.
“I could kill you,” he said hoarsely. “That would silence your vile mouth.”
“I am not the vile one among us,” Joseph said, still in that tone of deadly politeness. “And lords can still be punished for murder nowadays. We live in the Dark Ages no longer.”
“Papa.” Priscilla was sobbing. “Just go. You’ve ruined everything, as usual. I was a fool to think we could reconcile.”
Wigsby wavered. Really, for all his cunning, the man had the worst instincts for self-preservation that Inez had ever seen.
It came, she supposed, from being born to what he was taught was a position of superiority, and bred with an undeserved sense of his own importance alongside contempt for anyone beneath him.
Joseph had block-headed tendencies from time to time, but he would never be a tyrant.
He was too sensitive, too aware. And he looked a conquering hero of old in his dusty coat and dirty boots, with the civilized ruffle of his neckcloth above his waistcoat and the deadly small sword in his steady hand.
He looked like a highwayman, and Inez discovered a heretofore interest in a fantasy of being kidnapped and carried away by a gentleman of the road.
“I-I won’t stand for this,” Wigsby stuttered. “All of you against me.”
“I am not greatly informed on points of law,” Joseph mused.
“But my brother, the Duke of Hunsdon, has some training as a barrister. He might be disposed to advise me about actions available to a persecuted daughter, or a persecuted former maid, when her master brings false accusations to a court of law.”
Wigsby, his hands shaking, set the silk bag of jewels on the table.
“Robbers and thieves,” he swore. “You brought me here merely to steal from me again. I won’t stand for it.”
“You will have to stand for it elsewhere, but not here, unless you intend me to stain this Axminster rug with your blood.”
Wigsby paled beneath his powder. “Threatening a lord! I have witnesses.”
“I heard mention of Dark Lane.” Jock spoke from the doorway. Leaning on his crutches, which he had somehow got up the stairs, he didn’t appear a man disposed to physical combat. And yet Inez suspected that, did Jock intend to bar his lordship’s egress, Wigsby wouldn’t make it down the stairs.
“I heard mention of the Duke of Hunsdon,” Jock added with a careless air. “Meself, I wouldn’t want to get on that one’s hard side. He’s a devil if you poke ’im.”
Joseph sheathed his sword. “Jock, is his lordship’s conveyance below?”
“Ready and waitin’,” Jock confirmed.
Priscilla’s face fell as her father stormed from the room without looking at her, his stare of accusation—and, Inez feared, retribution—focused on Joseph.
When he was gone, Inez groped for the back of a nearby embroidered chair and sank down upon it, too overcome to worry about the niceties of being seated when Priscilla wasn’t.
Joseph moved instantly to her side. “Did he hurt you?”
“Only threatened.” She reached out and he caught her hand, and the warmth and solidness of him made her melt. She wanted to curl herself inside his dusty coat, button herself against his heart, and stay there always.
“I suppose that means we won’t get the Meissen figures you wanted,” Pierre reflected. “Nor the last of your clothes, ma belle.”
“Pierre!” Priscilla put her hands to her face. “How can you think of my property at a time like this?”
“It is our property, ma cocotte, and our fortune,” Pierre protested, putting his arms around his wife.
Inez leaned her head against Joseph’s chest. “How did you get here so quickly?”
“Treen very obligingly gave me a horse. A sound, strong hack from the Callington coaching inn.”
“Didn’t founder ’im, neither,” Jock added. “He’s in the mews behind, mendin’ is bellows.”
“Proper done, me ansome,” Inez said with a smile. “As Wenna would say. I assume she told you?”
He stared into her eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Inez glanced at the table with the jewels spilling from the silk cloth. It was all out of the bag, so to speak. He would see what she had done. Every argument for her lack of worth, laid before him as evidence.
She’d wanted to mend things. She’d wanted to come to him clean and free and ask him to say, clearly and finally, what she meant to him. But now, surely, she was tainted.
“I didn’t want you to see,” she managed past the knot in her throat. “I wanted it all to be at an end. Over and behind me.”
“Inez. My darling.” Joseph went to one knee beside her, clasping her hand between both of his. She could barely feel his grip through the heavy leather riding gloves. He stripped them off, threw them on the table, and repossessed himself of her hands.
“Don’t you know there is nothing you could do that would alter my esteem for you?”
“Esteem,” she echoed. It seemed a soft word.
A word that daintily skirted the fringes of the roaring blaze that grew in her simply at his nearness, at his touch.
At the earnest, steadfast way he stared at her, the cognac gleaming in his eyes.
His eyes went that color when he was in the grip of passion. Inez tightened her hold on his hands.
“That is a weak word,” he admitted. “Call it adoration. Call it—rapture. I am completely borne away by you, Inez. I do not exist when you are not with me.”
“Do not exist?” she murmured. Her heart fancied itself a balloon again, rising, swelling, dancing on air. Her ribs ached with the effort to constrain it. She gripped his fingers all the more firmly. “That is perhaps coming it too strong—”
“Jock would say I am rushing my fences,” Joseph admitted.
“After only a week together, in truth. But in that week, Inez, I have discovered myself. I finally feel I know who I am.” He pulled their clasped hands to his chest, above his heart, which she could not feel beating through all the layers of fabric, but wanted to fancy she could.
“I am not ashamed of the man I am, when I am with you. It’s a change I welcome. I feel stronger. Better. Bolder. And more…” He groped for the word.
He was going to say something about lust. No, she begged silently, let lust not be what drew and bound him.
Let desire not be the sum total of his regard for her.
Lust was what her mother’s patrons came to relieve themselves of in that tiny, cramped room.
Lust was what earned the ladies of Dark Lane their keep.
She wanted the force that had made Amaranthe Illingworth take the leap from being a vicar’s daughter to a duchess. She wanted what had drawn her father back to them, every time, and what had pulled her mother across land and sea to be with her beloved.
“I have been searching for a companion,” Joseph said, looking into her eyes, and she saw his heart there. “God knows it was above all what I wanted. I looked in all the wrong places, of course.”
Inez nodded. He had. And all the while she was right beneath his nose—
“And all while you were right there,” he said. “In my house. I knew the first time you entered the room where I sat…”
He leaned back on his heels. She leaned forward.
She remembered that moment when she had first beheld Joseph Illingworth in his study, bent over his books, that lock of unruly hair falling across his brow, his coat hung over the chair and his shirtsleeves rolled up and his fingers stained with ink as he scrambled to take notes at the speed with which his mind moved.
She had fallen under his spell in that moment, and she had never even tried to escape.
“I remember I was reading Priestley,” Joseph said. “I babbled something at you about it. And you simply nodded and listened and did not tell you to be off with myself.”
“You’d discovered something,” she murmured. “You were delighted.”
He nodded. “And then you appeared. And I looked at you, with your kerchief about you and you holding that tray with tea and biscuits and listening to me natter about Priestley’s theories of mind, and I thought—insofar I was thinking of anything—I thought, ‘This is the kind of woman the Stoics admire.’”