Chapter 16
Long, tapered white wax candles danced with yellow flames, casting their light along the silk walls.
Fennyman stood in the center of the room, one that he could only have imagined standing in a mere two decades ago.
Oh, what a life he did lead now.
The little boy he had once been would be amazed and disbelieving. In fact, that little boy, no doubt, would have been quite sure that all of this was a dream and completely unattainable for someone like him.
Though he had been born into rooms like these. If he tried very, very hard, he could still remember the stucco ceiling, and the gold gilding, and the painted murals on his bedroom walls as a child.
But once he had lost it, he had been certain he’d never have it again.
That was the sort of thing that happened when one’s entire reality was ripped away from one. When one lived a charmed life of love and wealth and privilege, and then suddenly had it all taken away, to be replaced by death and fear and grime and cruelty at every possible moment.
Fennyman knew how to manipulate the wealthiest, most powerful people in England because he had been raised by them and then seen their utter cruelty. He knew how they could cast out a child like he was dirty bathwater.
And he had been cast out, just as bathwater was thrown into the gutter. Somehow, he had managed to survive on his own intelligence, his own resources.
A smile tilted his lips.
What an arrogant lie that was.
He had been lucky, because he had been taken in by other people at various times. First, there had been a group of pickpockets, then some kind, failed actresses.
So many people had been thrown out of their own lives and were barely surviving. Often, they were the kindest. But one had to be careful. Because they could be the most monstrous too, having nothing to lose.
Raised with nothing to eat and rats gnawing at his toes, he had figured out how to manipulate, and to steal, and to seize money.
And then he’d discovered how to blackmail, which had made his club possible.
And once he had formed that, he had had no compunction of getting as much wealth and land as he could from the gentlemen who walked through his doors every day.
Guilt never touched him because he had seen how those men would throw everything they had away for a single moment of feeling, anything to make them feel something other than the privilege of their own lives.
He realized that he had actually been gifted by being thrown out, by being made to feel completely and totally alive.
And now, as he stood in the Duke of Rivers’ house in a glorious chamber, he could not stop thinking about Miss Ernestine Foxley.
He had made an error.
Her picture, the earl’s picture, and several others were on the wall of his room.
He, like the duke, now spent most of his time planning on what people should be paired together, because the duke paid him a great deal of money.
And truth be told, there was a part of him that felt powerful, and he loved the idea that he was completely rewriting society through his will and his own machinations.
But Miss Ernestine Foxley? He could not hurt her. No, just as he could not hurt the last young lady, Miss Agatha Allen.
He was the last stand, the bastion in all of this, protecting women from being maneuvered and ruined by men who cared only for their own lives and their own opinions.
Rivers was different. He would give that to the duke. There was something slightly strange about him, which made him separate from the rest of the ton. All the men that they had chosen were different too. That had been imperative, but they were all extremely powerful, all extremely arrogant.
One couldn’t be born and raised into the ton without that.
Ernestine Foxley was none of those things.
Ernestine Foxley was like him, a survivor and broken, and that was where he had made his error. He had assumed, as the Duke of Rivers had, as Philip had, and even Harlowe, that once Seaborough started paying attention to her and fawning over her, she would not be able to resist.
After all, he was a rake amongst rakes. Ladies loved him. But they had forgotten one single thing. She had been cut off from love as a child, and he knew the danger of that.
And she was never ever going to be able to choose Seaborough or love him, as he and the duke and Philip had thought, if she stayed the person she was.
No, she was going to have to become someone entirely new, and he knew what he was going to have to do to make that happen.
It wasn’t at all what any of them had thought. And even with his help, he feared she would not be able to do it. Life made people what they were and, sadly, love was never enough to fix them. But at least, for her, he would try.