Chapter 22
Ezra felt… strange.
Good, of course. But too good. That had not been normal lovemaking, had it? No—he was not the untried virgin of the two, though he supposed neither of them qualified any longer.
With Letty, it had been… Remarkable.
He buried his face in her hair, not minding that it tickled his nose.
He didn’t mind much right now, to be frank.
That was unusual. He usually lay in bed at night for hours, unable to quiet his mind as he puzzled over something.
The fire, most frequently, but also other things, too.
How to care for his tenants. Iris. His father, when he was still alive.
But now, there was nothing but the quiet hum of sated pleasure, nothing but the warm, soft woman in his arms.
And then Letty, his Letty—damn what anyone else thought about it—began to stir.
“What are you doing?” he grumbled, halfway asleep. He tightened his arms around her. He could not think of one single good reason for her to be moving right now.
“Ezra.” Something in her voice gave him pause, though she spoke softly and gently. “I have to go.”
He was no longer asleep. He was no longer even remotely asleep.
He sat up as sharply as if she had jabbed him with a hatpin.
“What are you talking about?” he asked. Maybe she just wanted to go… clean herself. The bathing chamber was right there. He supposed he could let her go that far. As long as she promised to be right back.
But the look on her face told him otherwise. He felt different. He felt extraordinary.
She did not.
“I have to go,” she repeated, her voice gentle in a way that broke his heart. “You know this. I cannot be found here.”
He shook his head. The words made sense logically, but his mind refused to accept them as true.
“If anyone suspects what we just did...” she went on, still in that horribly gentle way. “I will be ruined. I will never find another job in London.”
He seized upon this, feeling a strange flutter in his chest. Was that desperation? Surely it could not be. He was not a desperate man.
“If it’s money you’re worried about, you needn’t,” he said. “You will always have a place in my home, Letty. Always. I would never let you find yourself out on the streets.”
She sighed as though he were the one being difficult.
“It wouldn’t work,” she said. “Working here, living here, being with you… We could never have all those things. It would fall apart. Catastrophically. You know this.”
Again, Ezra had the strange sensation that he was trying to stop water from filtering through his cupped hands.
“You don’t need to work for me,” he said. He knew he sounded ridiculous. He knew he sounded like a spoiled child who didn’t know how to accept the word no. But he needed to try. He needed to make the offer.
He had always scorned men who kept mistresses, but God. For her, he would do it. What was pride compared to getting to keep Letty?
He swore that his heart paused in his chest when she hesitated.
“I… I can’t,” she said, sounding like she was genuinely sorry to say it. “I am sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” he told her, hating that she looked distressed. She nibbled anxiously at her lip.
“It’s not that I think that what we did was wrong,” she hastened to add. “It was…”
She trailed off as though she could not find the words, and, on this at least, Ezra found they were in complete agreement.
“I know,” he said.
“But for us to keep going—having what should be a marriage, if it were right and if the world would let it… It just is not right. It would end so badly. We would both get so hurt.”
She was being generous, he knew. She would get hurt so much worse than he would, no matter what the pain in his chest was currently telling him. He crushed that pain down until it turned into irritation.
Why was she ignoring anything good that could come of this and only clinging to the bad? Maybe she just needed to be reminded that there was another way.
“What if it didn’t, though? What if it didn’t end badly?” He gave her a hopeful smile. “What if we didn’t get hurt?”
She frowned at him.
“It will,” she said.
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that!” She had still been in the bed beside him for all of this conversation, but now she pulled away, rising to her feet.
He had a brief glimpse of her, gloriously naked, before she grabbed her shift and pulled it over her head, getting herself dressed much more quickly than he had managed to disrobe her.
“I am a servant, Ezra!” she snapped, huffing in irritation as she picked up her stays, looked at the laces that went up the back, and threw them back down on the ground. “I will always be a servant. Do you know what people would say about me?”
Her temper sparked his even higher. God, why did it always come back to this? Yes, he knew it would be harder for her to disregard talk, but why did it always return to what other people would think?
This was about that bastard viscount.
“You know the longer that you let him control you, the more power you give him, right?” he asked.
Letitia had been midway through drawing up the sleeves of her gown, even if she would not be able to fasten it properly. At his words, she froze instead.
“That’s not fair,” she said, not even looking at him as she spoke.
It wasn’t, and he knew it.
“You can’t tell me that he isn’t the reason you are running scared now,” he accused, stumbling into his trousers as he went. He felt rather as though someone else was controlling his words. He wished he could stop himself from saying them. He wished he could shout them.
He tried to reach out and grab her arm, not to hurt her, just to stop her for a moment, just to make her listen for a little—
She shook him off, and when she whirled on him, he could see that he’d made a mistake. She was brimming with anger.
“Oh, that is bold, coming from you,” she returned, anger burning in her gaze.
“Do you think I don’t see it? The way you look half-hopeful, half-terrified every time Iris mentions anything about the past?
Every time your family is mentioned? You tell yourself you are hunting for answers, but you are hiding from the very people who might give them to you, Ezra. You run, too. You chase ghosts, too.”
He bristled, but it was more temper than real objection to what she was saying. Maybe he bristled because he didn’t fully object to what she was saying. Evidently, he still had his pride, after all.
“Better chasing ghosts than refusing to stay in one place because you are too frightened.”
She opened her mouth to retort, to say something that was no doubt barbed in acid. He braced himself for it—then watched as she closed her mouth again without uttering a word. He watched as she smoothed away her temper behind the facade of a dutiful servant, and, God—God. That was so much worse.
“It’s time for me to go,” she said in a polite, distant voice that he could have sworn he had never heard from her, not even in the beginning. “I thank you for a wonderful evening.”
He felt the fight go out of him, too, leaving only emptiness in its wake.
“At least let me see you back home,” he said woodenly. He didn’t think he could bear to stay in this empty room as she left him behind. “So that I know you are safe.”
He knew she would shake her head even before she did.
“You are what I need to protect myself from,” she said, not unkindly. “I am a servant. You are a duke. It’s time we start acting like it.”
Ezra wondered if some part of him was bleeding. Surely there had to be some physical mark of what he was feeling right now. A bruise. A broken bone. Something.
It is just wounded pride, he told himself. Just infatuation.
“Very well,” he heard himself say. “Goodnight then, Miss Knightley.”
For an instant, she appeared as if he had slapped her, but immediately after—that is, before he could even think about apologizing or approaching her—she looked thankful.
Now Ezra felt like the one who had been slapped.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
And then she slipped away into the night, leaving Ezra behind, feeling completely uncertain about how it had ever come to this.
* * *
To hell with pride and to hell with frugality.
Letty hired a hack home, and she sobbed the entire ride back to her rented rooms.
She knew that she had to look a fright and she felt even worse. Her gown was only half-fastened. Her eyes were burning with tears, and they looked swollen and red. Her hair was entirely unbound.
None of it compared to the shrieking, cavernous hole in her chest.
Part of her wanted to tell the driver to turn around.
She could go back. She could tell Ezra that she would be his mistress.
Surely he would not ever make her feel cheap, would he?
He wouldn’t ever make her feel as though she didn’t matter because of her class.
If anything, he was almost intolerably ignorant of the machinations of class, his privilege making him blind to the differences between them.
But every time she was almost convinced that this was the path forward, something held her back.
It was the knowledge that, for all that she hurt now, it would hurt that much worse if she had to do this after—what? Weeks? Months? Even years at his side? There was no other ending, no matter what he professed. There was nothing but tragedy ahead.
She tried to clean up the mess of her face a bit when the carriage pulled up in front of her rooms, but this stupid bloody lady’s dress didn’t have proper pockets, because real ladies carried fancy reticules.
Letty had borrowed one from Persephone, but she had left it behind in Ezra’s bedchamber.
He would have to see to getting it returned himself.
She was just lucky that she had a few coins tucked away in the pocket of her cloak.
She paid the driver, who looked as though he was trying very hard not to notice her disarray. Small mercies, she supposed. She thanked him with only a slightly audible sniffle in her voice, then let herself up the narrow staircase to her chambers.
When she opened the door, she paused. The fire was burning—not banked, but properly burning—yet she had been gone for hours.
Had the landlady come in to start a fire?
That would have been extraordinarily strange; she only ever came in to clean once a week, and she was unlikely to risk burning down her business by leaving a fire unattended for so long.
Letty was trying to decide if it was worth it to go downstairs and ask, or if her half-dressed state, not to mention the late hour, was likely to get her summarily evicted for lack of character when she heard it.
“Hello, my darling,” purred a voice she had hoped never to hear again.
Every inch of her froze. She could not even breathe. She could not even blink. Maybe her heart itself stopped.
Peter Dugley, the man who had haunted her every nightmare these past years, stepped into the circle of firelight, wearing a self-satisfied smirk that made Letitia’s stomach churn.
“Wh-what are you doing here?” she managed. She stumbled half a step back. She was closer to the door. She could make it. She could get free.
Peter pulled a pistol from his pocket.
“Now, now, my pet,” he crooned, as if they were sweethearts, and not at all as though he was brandishing a weapon in her direction.
“Is that any way to greet me after all this time? I must say, I was very put out when you didn’t respond to my letter.
I know you received it. But maybe you thought I was bluffing.
Maybe you thought I didn’t mean it when I told you that you would never escape me. ”
Letitia’s eyes kept darting between Peter’s face and the bright silver of the pistol in his hand.
She wanted to believe that he wouldn’t use it, or that he was a wretched shot, but she had worked in the household for too long to let that falsehood stand.
He was far too comfortable with firearms for her to dare to try to outrun him.
“I... I am sorry,” she stammered. “I didn’t—”
“You’re sorry,” he mocked, speaking over her.
“Yes, I am quite sure that you are sorry now.” He shook his head at her.
“But I am afraid that you aren’t nearly as sorry as you are going to be.
You have been very naughty, my girl. I tried to be patient, you know.
I was pleased when I heard that the family you were working for—that little rebellion of yours—were coming to Belgium. "
Letty shivered at this indication that he had been watching her for so long.
Just as horrifying was this idea that he had built up a whole story about them in his head, that he’d really believed that she was just having a missish tizzy before ultimately and inevitably returning to him.
Like this was a romantic novel where the maiden played coy to make the hero prove his love.
“But then,” he went on, frowning scoldingly, “you declined to come with them. You declined to come back to me. As if I would have let you stay working for those people for long. I would have provided for you, dearest, you know that. But you threw my generosity in my face. And behavior like that simply cannot go unpunished. But it is for your own good. You will see that. Eventually.”
“Please,” she tried, because what else was there to do in the face of that weapon. “Please.”
“Hush now,” he said. “It’s time for you to come with me. To come home at last. And my darling?”
His smile bloomed like a poisonous flower.
“If you try to scream, I promise that you will regret it.”