Chapter 12
Twelve
Madelaine didn’t turn as Lord Cotereigh softly but firmly ushered her weeping and apologetic aunt from the room. She felt he would look back as he closed the door, and she couldn’t be sure what her face would reveal under the glance of those dark eyes.
She was close to being overcome herself, with the boy’s weakness and his pain, and her aunt’s distress, and the embarrassment of having brought all this messy, needy humanity into Lord Cotereigh’s perfectly ordered house.
The man himself was overpowering too. Imperious and hard and demanding.
She’d only ever been able to meet him toe-to-toe and eye to eye because she’d felt so sure of her own superiority—in all those areas that mattered.
She was good, and he was not, and so all his haughty finery, all his height and certainty, all his dark, masculine authority—that oh so lordly air—it had been easy to brush aside like the superficial puffery it was.
But now…now she was guilty and grateful, grateful in a way she hadn’t been for bonnets and dresses given to her to serve his own ends. She was grateful now for…for his kindness. How could she hate him if he was kind?
And how could she be safe if she didn’t hate him?
“Come now,” she said to the boy, “you can step in, see. The side here is low.”
It would hurt him, this bath. The walk from the sofa had already left him trembling.
But there always came this moment in nursing, in caring, whether it was taking one of her small brothers to the dentist to have a tooth pulled or as simple as changing a bandage on a tender wound or digging out a recalcitrant splinter.
One inevitably caused pain in the process of doing necessary good.
She knew it, but she still felt the boy’s torment, the guilt of it cold and slippery down her spine, hurting all her insides as she made him sit down in the bath.
His strength gave out, and he half fell the last part with a cry of pain, splashing her dress as she sank to her knees with him, trying to steady him as best she could.
“There.” She let out a breath. “You’re in. The worst is over.”
The boy sat still, head bowed, only his skinny, bruised ribs rising and falling with the breaths he took against the pain. His eyes were squeezed shut. “Why…why are you doing this?”
“You’ll feel much better once you’re clean and all this itchiness stopped.”
He shook his head, eyes still shut. “No, I mean…any of it. Why did you bring me here? Why are you…? Who are you? I don’t know what you want from me.”
“Just to help you. That’s all.”
The bathtub was copper and very fine. With another sting of guilt, she realised it must be Lord Cotereigh’s own.
She’d been provided with a cup, and she used it to scoop up some water and pour it slowly over the boy’s shoulders and back.
It would be better to soak some of this ingrained dirt away then to scrub his bruised skin vigorously with soap and cloth.
She made sure his splinted arm rested on the bath’s edge, out of the stream of water.
“But why? What do you want? I won’t go into one of those houses.”
“The workhouse?”
He shook his head. “Not them either. But I mean those other houses. Where men pay to—”
“No,” she said quickly. “It is nothing like that. Do you know of charity? There are people and organisations who like to help less fortunate people, simply because it is the right thing to do. It is like that.”
“Some church thing?”
“Almost. I suppose it has something in common with that.” The steady rhythm of scooping the water and hearing it fall soothed her—soothed the boy too, she thought, as did the wonderful properties of the warm bath.
His shoulders gradually dropped and he sat with his eyes open but his expression fixed, scowling at the end of the bathtub.
“Who is he, then? I heard you call him lord. He’s some gentry sort; seems as fine as a duke’s, this house.”
“Lord Cotereigh is a viscount. His father is the Earl of Arnon.”
The boy let out a breath that was all hard scorn but perhaps as close as he came to a laugh. “Fancy me in a viscount’s house. Jem would—” He cut himself off, scowling harder than ever, a blackened grubby thumbnail picking at a faint bump in a hammered seam of the bath’s rolled copper top.
“Is Jem your brother? A relative?”
“He’s no one.” The shoulders had tensed back up, even higher than before. “I won’t say nothing.”
“Very well.” She knew, anyway, who Jem would be.
The leader of his gang, most-like, some older, even more vicious boy.
Or perhaps even an adult, the head of whatever criminal group recruited these boys into picking pockets for them, and in return gave them a little dubious protection and a roof of some kind to sleep under.
“Are you his missus, then? And that woman with the cake, she’s your mother, or his?”
“Ah. No. That lady is my aunt, Lady Pemberthy. And Lord Cotereigh…he is a friend. Not my husband.”
It was at that moment the door opened and Lord Cotereigh himself returned to the room.
Caught unawares, she looked up and straight at him, but whatever her expression said, the loudest part was probably the blush that burned unaccountably across her cheeks. She busied herself again with cup and water.
“Is my aunt all right?”
“I left her sitting comfortably in the drawing room with a pot of sweet tea and my housekeeper, Mrs Clare, on hand to keep her company or attend to any needs she might have.”
“Thank you.”
She heard his tread. Gleaming boots and closely tailored buff-cloth encasing knee and thigh came to a stop to her left.
“Goodness. This water is brown already.”
“I didn’t ask for no bath—”
“Peace, boy. You clearly needed one. I take one every single day, and so shall you, while you’re under my roof.”
His leather boots creaked, there was the rustle of luxurious cloth, and then Lord Cotereigh was kneeling beside her, shrugging out of his coat.
He twisted, setting it on the floor behind him, looking at her as he did so. There was a faint smile in his eyes. But then his attention snagged on her dress front. Oh. Yes. She was wet there from being splashed.
He looked away as she blushed, though really—she glanced down to check—nothing untoward had been revealed, the cotton and all her layers were too thick for that.
Lord Cotereigh began unbuttoning his wrist cuffs.
He folded the crisp linen of his shirt sleeves up to his elbows.
Surprisingly strong, his wrists and forearms, for a man who did no real work for a living.
And she was no stranger to men’s physiques—one couldn’t be when one lived near the sea and saw all the fishermen and farmers about their work in all the hot, high days of summer.
One couldn’t be when one had been married.
But his strength shouldn’t surprise her. She’d felt it already when he so easily lifted her down from the sideboard that time she’d been fixing the wallpaper. The impression of his hands at her waist had lasted even longer than her affront.
He rode, she supposed. And did all those other sports gentlemen thought fit to fill their idle hours.
Boxing and fencing and games of cricket.
Did he row? He took up a washcloth and dipped it in the water, wetting both his hands.
Did he swim? Did he ever cut strongly through cool, green-blue water, sun making diamonds of the droplets on his broad shoulders…
No. No…that was Alfred. Alfred who those thoughts belonged to.
It was Alfred who swum like a fish and laughed like a water sprite, grinning and wicked and strong and lithe.
Lord Cotereigh’s skin was pale, not Alfred’s roguish tan.
There was no wildness there, despite the muscle, despite the dark hairs that crested each ridge.
“Here, boy.” Lord Cotereigh lathered the wet cloth thoroughly with the soap.
“You rub yourself; you’ll know how best not to hurt those bruises overmuch.
But you’ll do a good job, and you’ll do it for…
” He’d dried his hands on a cloth then pulled out his watch.
“For three whole minutes. I’ll give you ten pence. Deal?”
The boy clenched the soapy cloth in his good hand. “Ought to be fifteen pence. Then that’s five a minute.”
Lord Cotereigh raised a brow as Madelaine smiled at the boy’s audacity. Whatever terrible things the streets had done to him, they’d certainly made him tough.
“Someone taught you some mathematics, did they?”
The boy scowled. “Them numbers is easy. I ain’t no flat. I knows how to count and reckon up.”
“Well, then, Captain Sharp. I know when I’m beat. Fifteen pence it is.”
“I ain’t had my three yet.”
“As I’ve told you before, casting doubt on a gentleman’s honour is terribly bad manners. You’d get called out for less. You’ll have your three, and your fifteen—”
“Makes eighteen, that does.”
“Indeed. And you’ll have all eighteen of those pennies, once you’re clean, dried, clothed, and have eaten an entire slice of that cake. Deal?”
The boy eyed him, probing for doubt. “You really a viscount?”
“I am.”
“They say your sort always keeps their word.”
“I wish that were true. We’re certainly meant to. But I can only speak for myself in this instance. I will keep my word, Tonks. I’ve kept every wager I’ve ever made. I would ask you not to doubt me again.”
“All right.” The boy propped the soapy cloth on the knobbly knee that poked out of the now-grimy water. He spat on his hand and held it out to the viscount, who eyed it with such distaste Madelaine had to laugh.
“You’ll clean that paw before you offer it to me.”
The boy scowled but flapped his hand in the water before holding it out again. Lord Cotereigh solemnly pressed the dripping, bony fingers. “That’s the formalities concluded, Master Tonks. Now for the scrubbing.”