Chapter Twenty-Five #2
“Benjamin.” Charlotte looked up at him, willing him to meet her gaze. When he did, she reached up to trace the rough stubble that had cropped up on his jaw. “What happened to you after Delia passed?”
The idea of Benjamin as a young boy, suddenly alone in the world, broke her heart all over again for him.
His eyes were shuttered when they met hers. “It does not matter.” She had pushed too hard. Once again, she had broken the tenuous thread between them with her probing. “I fended for myself until I was sixteen. Wells found me and offered me a job. I took the position. And from it, I built this.”
Charlotte only nodded and looked down again. She did not want him to see the disappointment in her eyes that he did not want to confide in her. Or the anger at herself for jeopardising the gentle haven they had found themselves in. He had already given her so much.
He seemed to misunderstand her silence as censure. Defensively, he said, “Now that I have this, the past does not matter.”
Charlotte suspected that he was trying to convince himself more than her, so she just nodded, her cheek rubbing along the dark hair of his chest.
“Why did you start writing?” he asked. She felt him pick up a tendril of her hair and wrap it around his finger. “And do not say to pay off your brother’s debts. I know you have been playing the journalist since before your father passed.”
Surprised by that, she looked up. She had been eminently discreet about her investigations into the working and living conditions of the poor before she had begun selling her work for publication.
“Everybody talks, Charlotte. It is just a matter of asking the right people.” For a moment, with the flickering shadows of the night dancing across his hard-planed face, Charlotte could see him as the lethal, calculating underworld kingpin he was reputed to be.
The Master of London’s Secrets. Then he smiled, a gleam of mischief in his crinkling eyes, and she wanted to tell him every secret she had ever had.
“My lady’s maid inspired me to write,” Charlotte said quietly.
It sounded spoiled and vapid after the revelations of his own misfortune. That it took seeing another suffer for her to realise there was a world outside of her quaint Mayfair existence was humbling.
His brow quirked at that, and she propped herself on his chest, hands folded beneath her chin, rising and falling with his breath. “I found her. I was on a morning walk in Regent’s Park, without a groom or chaperone of any kind. I thought myself quite rebellious.”
She smiled at that and was surprised as he gently tucked a curl behind her ear. She looked up to find him watching her intently, and she momentarily lost her train of thought. Benjamin nodded, encouraging her to continue.
“I just saw the hem of her dress in the bushes. I thought it was a lost parasol or something. I was not even going to stop to pick it up. But then, something came over me, and I had to look closer.”
She was back in the park on that rainy morning.
The spring had been cold and damp, and her stepmother had moved the family back to London; she was so stir-crazy in the dreary countryside.
The boys had been driving their nanny to distraction, and so Charlotte had taken to occupying Freddie or the twins while Nanny took the other.
When she found herself with a rare morning alone, she had struck out to the park—a young lady with no real occupation besides entertaining her half brothers, the idea of a solo trip to the park seemed a true adventure.
So she had gone, bundled in thick country wool against the damp, and determined to walk as far and wide as possible.
She was tiring by the time she reached the hedgerows of Regent’s Park. Her toes had also begun to freeze, and she planned to head back for luncheon soon. When she approached the hem of the skirt protruding from the bushes, she did not know what she would find.
Anna Witton was so battered, one could hardly make out her face. Her tattered clothes were torn from her body in graphic fashion, and dried blood and bruises were visible in the exposed places.
“She was not even crying. It was as if she had crawled under there to die.”
The hollowness in Charlotte’s chest upon looking down at the woman’s broken form was just as sharp now as it had been that morning. She felt a warm, rough hand cup her cheek, and she looked up. Benjamin was there. He was with her. He stroked her cheek gently and allowed her to continue.
“I tried to wake her up, but she was fading in and out. Finally, I was able to pull her mostly upright and get my walking coat around her. I do not know how I managed to get her to the street, but I hailed a hackney cab and brought her home. Luckily, my lady’s maid had just left to get married, and my stepmother was not much bothered by the hiring of the household.
It took a week for Anna to be well enough to walk again.
And even then, it was nearly a month before she spoke.
I made do with making myself up and covered for her until she was ready for the position.
” Charlotte smiled nostalgically at the memory of the bond that had grown between them.
Anna had become a true friend. “I realised that morning in the park that I was wasting my life if I was not using it to try to help people like her.
“I tried publishing a few of my pieces on children’s living conditions in the Dials with some charitable organisations I am part of, but the ladies would not hear of it.
They were scandalised that I had even ventured to such a part of town.
After that, I do not think they even had the energy to be scandalised by the conditions themselves.
” Her lips twisted in a rueful smile. “It was not until the desperation of our financial predicament that I even thought of publishing under a pen name.”
“Necessity is a powerful motivator.”
Spoken like a man who knew.