Chapter Twenty #2
"You needn't tell me anything you don't wish to."
"I know." He drew a slow breath, still watching the fire rather than her. "My Ma raised us after my father died. She took in washing—other people's linens, other people's shirts to make ends meet."
He paused again.
"In the winter I can remember how her hands cracked and bled, and it still wasn't enough to keep the three of us properly fed."
"What did you do?"
"I learned to fight." He said it plainly, without embellishment.
"There was a man called Old Danny who ran matches out of a yard near the docks, and he'd an eye for which boys could take a beating and keep standing after it.
I was scrawny as a rake at sixteen, but I'd apparently a talent for staying on my feet longer than sense would recommend, and Danny paid better for a boy who lost slowly than one who went down in the first round.
So I fought. Badly, at first. Better, after a time. "
"You were only sixteen?"
"Ye. Though I lied about being older, of course—no one asks too closely when there's money changing hands on the outcome."
He glanced at her briefly, something rueful in the look.
"Every purse went toward rent, or bread, or my sister's shoes, whichever wanted it worst that month.
Never once toward anything a boy that age ought to have wanted for himself.
And after a time, fighting was simply what I was.
Not a trade I'd chosen, particularly, only the one thing I'd found I was good for, when nothing else in Southwark seemed willing to have me. "
"So what happened to them?" Helena asked quietly. "Your mother and sister?"
"Fever took em," he said softly, although she could hear the rawness in his voice. "Nearly six years ago now."
"I am so sorry, Isaac."
For a long moment the room fell silent.
"You know, I believed for years that fighting was the only thing I had any real talent for," he said.
"And then Harrow walked into a Hounslow tavern and told me I was a baron.
The first thing I thought was, well it was a good thing that I learned to read and write as a boy.
Because you can't be a Baron if you can't read or write. "
He shook his head, giving a throaty chuckle.
"You know, sometimes, I can't help but wonder if I'd have been better off staying in Southwark.
That no matter how many times I sit in the House of Lords, they'll never learn to see me differently.
I will always just be a fighter playing at being a gentleman.
I don't imagine that goes away, whatever coat I wear over it. "
Helena shifted toward him, her eyes meeting his.
"You've done more genuine good for the people depending on you in these few months than most men born to a title manage in a lifetime of holding one," she said.
"And I've watched you do it, Isaac. Helping people, that's the very thing a title is meant to be used for, and precious few men who inherit one ever trouble themselves to do so. "
He looked at her then, something in his expression shifting, softening.
"Can I tell you something?" he asked.
Helena hesitated a moment and then nodded.
"These past weeks," he said slowly. "Teaching me my forks and my cravats and stumbling through that ridiculous dance—they've been the happiest I can remember, Nell.
I don't know when that happened, exactly, or how I let it happen, given everything sensible in me arguing against it.
But I've stopped seeing much point in pretending otherwise, at least to myself.
I enjoy your company more than I've any business doing. "
The confession settled over Helena with a weight she had not expected, drawing forward everything she had spent weeks trying not to examine too closely.
The whole ruined shape of the life she had fled, the family she could likely never return to, the reputation that no eventual reclaiming of her own name could ever fully restore.
Even if some miracle undid the scandal that had driven her from London, she knew that the respectable marriage once expected of Lady Helena Winford was almost certainly lost to her now.
She had nothing left to offer any man of her own former rank.
She had, perhaps, only this: a quiet room, a fire, and a man who had just told her, without artifice or calculation, that she had become dear to him.
Neither of them spoke for a long while as the rain continued its steady percussion against the roof.
The fire was now lower in the grate, and the silence between them grew from something merely comfortable into something more charged, until Helena became aware that she had, without quite deciding to, shifted nearer to him along the hearth, and that his hand, resting on the floor between them, had come to rest against hers.
Neither of them pulled away. The warmth of his skin against hers felt dangerous, like touching a flame despite knowing the consequences.
Helena's breath caught in her throat, her heart hammering against her ribs with a rhythm that matched the storm outside.