Chapter Twelve
BBenjamin did not dare stay out for long.
For the last two days, he had been gripped with an overwhelming, roaring anxiety that he could only quiet by watching Charlotte’s chest rise up and down.
Each time it faltered, he felt his own throat threaten to squeeze shut. Her condition had only worsened.
She had not fully awoken since she collapsed in his office, only drifting from sleep, restless, eyes hazy and asking for nameless people—comfort Benjamin could not figure out how to give.
Occasionally, she thrashed and cried, afterwards quieting to a near-deathly stillness that had him begging, begging her to resurface.
Promising to find whoever she needed—be whoever she needed.
Finally, tonight, she had said a name. Freddie. Sleep-deprived and desperate, Benjamin seized it. Freddie. Frederick Aston, ninth Earl of Elford. He could find him for her.
And so, with Lizzy stationed by her side with orders to send for him immediately if something were to change, Benjamin set out.
In common workman’s clothes and soft-soled boots, he took to the streets that had once chewed him up, spit him out, and made him whatever he was today.
It was strange how easily his body remembered.
How quickly he took to the shadows and sounds of London’s night.
It had not taken him long to find Freddie's destination; his network had been watching closely for the movements of the young earl.
Freddie should have been in Mayfair, spending an evening at one of the insipid ton balls.
Or in St James’, at a club, maybe even one the likes of Elysium.
Maybe even at one of the early spring evenings in the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, though it was still a bit cold for those attractions to hold any real draw.
But no, much to Benjamin’s distaste, it seemed Frederick had chosen to spend his evening much further east than was wise for such a young lordling.
Benjamin stood in the alley across from the roiling house.
Shifting light spilled through the dilapidated shutters to reflect off the putrid puddles in the street as the sticky smell of tar smoke drifted through the air.
Patrons of all sorts were stumbling in and out.
Sailors, merchants, roughened factory men, and men that none so respectable as the former would dare to associate with.
Benjamin knew this place. And did not care for it.
He waited and watched as the seedy assortment of evening goers passed in and out of the establishment, remaining one with the shadows.
It was all he could do to hold himself there still, as each moment ticked by, reminding him of Charlotte fighting the infection he had inflicted upon her.
He could not think about it. The feral, fragile way she made him feel was untenable. He felt foreign to himself. A danger.
But he forced himself to stand there as still as death as the minutes slipped by, then turned into hours. And finally, his grit paid off.
A carriage rolled up the small, dirty street—far too fine for this side of town.
The idiot did not even have the sense to visit such a pit with the appropriate deference.
The patrons of a place like this—and, more importantly, the proprietors—could scent a stuffed hen a mile away.
They would fleece Freddie for all he was worth—admittedly not much—and leave him stripped to nothing, potentially bleeding into the pools of muck his carriage wheels now stopped in.
The street was too dark to make out the crest on the carriage.
It must belong to one of Elford’s other well-heeled friends.
Was there no end to the arrogant idiocy of this class of young lords?
Benjamin was baffled at their inability to sense their own limits.
To know when they had stooped too low, risked too much.
But to them, he supposed, in their manicured town homes and ancestral estates, there was no such thing as the squalor that could steal everything from you.
That could end your life. For them, each destination was just another chance at revelry.
Another set of people and places from which to squeeze some sort of pleasure and move on.
Before he could run through the list of which of the young earl’s wealthy, titled friends might be irresponsible enough to escort Elford to a cesspool like this, the carriage’s owner stepped out. And Benjamin’s stomach dropped.
Lord Ruben Deering was dressed below his usual standards of pomp and circumstance.
His heavy wool coat covered most of his clothing, but the boots and evening trousers that emerged when he descended the steps were not ostentatious enough to draw much attention from the passersby in the street.
He stepped gingerly across the puddle in the gutter, face contorted at whatever foulness wafted up to him from the dark pools.
Benjamin watched, his guts hot and seething as the light from the den played across the baron’s face.
He had aged since the last time Benjamin had seen him.
But the hatefulness in his manner made him appear unchanged, his stretched, sunken features a mask of sick humanity.
Hot fury flew through Benjamin’s veins and thrummed in his head.
Flashes of Delia—of her downcast eyes when she had told him she would live in the main house now that she was no longer a kitchen maid; her quick, distracted manner when he would come around back to visit her—to check on her when he felt something was wrong; her tear-stained face, mottled in bruises when she appeared at the boarding house, bag in hand, and told him she had lost her post. He saw her misery when she knew she was carrying the babe.
And then he heard the landlady, felt her kick in his ribs when she told him to get the body out so she could let the room.
He had failed her.
Shame rose in his throat, burning and acidic as he disgraced himself on the wall of the back alley.
Wave after wave of hot bile splashed off the bricks onto his boots.
He only just managed to look up and see the back Deering as he disappeared into the smoke-filled interior, Frederick Aston nowhere in sight.
The rough, bawdy, miserable singing spilled out the door and followed Ben as he slunk back into the night.
He would not fail Charlotte.
∞∞∞
“You look like shit.”
“Care to bring up a new point? You are becoming a bit repetitive.” Benjamin was not in the mood for idle chat.
Elkington shared a concerned look with Wells that made Benjamin want to break something. “He is right, you know. I don’t think I have ever seen you like this. Have you slept at all this week?”
“When did you two turn into such mother hens?” Benjamin was signing off on his latest receipt of kegs of ale. He had impatiently overseen their delivery and was anxious to be finished with the matter so he could return upstairs.
“Since you stopped eating, sleeping, and drinking.”
Benjamin stood, ready to leave the room, when he was met with the obstructive forms of his two closest friends. Their arms were crossed, and they were partially blocking the doorway.
“Get out of my way.”
“No. Not until you tell us what is wrong with you.”
Benjamin could commit murder. “What is wrong with me?” He tried to press past them, but they did not budge. “What is wrong with me is that I shot a woman, and now her life hangs in the balance.”
“Because of her own idiocy, not yours.”
Benjamin clenched his fists. He did not have many friends. He could not afford to kill these two. “She was not being idiotic. She was being noble.”
Wells was regarding Benjamin thoughtfully. “The two are not mutually exclusive.”
“You can’t help her if you are dead.” Elkington tilted his head. “What is it to you anyway? She is not your responsibility. Whether you shot her or not, she chose to take her brother’s place in the duel. If you had shot him, you would not be playing nursemaid.”
“If I had shot him, he would have been facing the consequences of his own recklessness. The duel was his idea, and now his sister is on death’s door while he is off, likely gallivanting around town, causing more trouble for his family.”
His network still had not tracked down the young earl again.
The boy obviously needed to be set straight, but judging by the company he was keeping with Deering, Freddie was likely frequenting the lowest establishments London had to offer and Benjamin would not allow his boys to venture after him.
Even children from the streets deserved to be sheltered where possible.
Freddie would have to be ironed out another day. Benjamin would nurse Charlotte back from the brink and then fix her family. It was the least he could do for her.
“You have not told him?” Elkington looked mystified.
“I have my scouts trailing him. I made sure he has been barred from all the institutions that gave him such lenient credit to begin with.” Benjamin ground out the response as quickly as possible, hating each word that kept him here downstairs while Lizzy was watching over Charlotte upstairs.
“What about her other brothers?”
“They are at school. And I am not a secretary. I cannot spend my days tracking down members of the Aston family. Not while I am trying to keep their sister alive.” Benjamin’s tone was like acid, but truth be told, he felt guilty for not reaching out to Charlotte’s younger brothers.
Somehow, he was sure she would not want to worry them, and he did not want to admit his own role in her condition.
“If you two want to be a help, you could do that. I don’t see you slaving over the club. ”
With that, he pushed past them and made his way back up the back stairs to his rooms.
There she was, just as he’d left her. Pale and unmoving in the middle of the large bed.
He hated the mix of emotions he felt seeing her there.
She looked like a shell of herself against the silk sheets, but he had seen nothing so right as Charlotte Aston in his bed, golden hair pooling about her beautiful face.
He walked carefully to the side of the bed and placed a hand on her cheek.
Still too warm. The fever had broken and returned twice in the last five days.
Price had shown him how to spoon water and broth down her throat the few moments she was relatively lucid, saying that, if the fever did not get her, dehydration would. He would not let that happen.
He twirled a silky strand of hair between his fingers and then took her hand in his, holding it to his cheek. “Come now, Charlotte. It is time for you to come back to the land of the living.”