Wicked Intentions

  Mrs. Dews met Lazarus’s eyes, her own worried and unsure.

  “Please.” He was too weak, too feverish to enforce his will. She had to do it for him. “I’d rather die by your hand than a drunken quack’s.”

  Abruptly she nodded and Lazarus sagged against the bed in relief. Mrs. Dews took the doctor’s arm and with a mixture of firmness and bewitching sweetness got the quack out of the room. She handed him over to the butler and then returned to Lazarus’s bedside.

  “I hope you’ve made the right decision,” she said quietly. “I have no training, only the practical skills of a woman who has taken care of many children.”

  As he looked into her extraordinary gold-flecked eyes, it occurred to Lazarus that he might very well be entrusting his life to this woman.

  He lay back on his bed, his mouth twisted in amused irony. “I have complete faith in you, Mrs. Dews.”

  And though his words were said in his usual sarcastic tone, he was surprised to discover that they were true.

  TEMPERANCE STARED DOWN at Lord Caire’s infected shoulder, aware that his avowal of trust had caused sweat to break out along her spine. The last man who’d trusted her had had his faith horribly betrayed.

  Now was not the time to think of the past, though. Temperance mentally shook herself. The wound was red and puffy, the edges swollen and inflamed with streaks of red radiating from it.

  “Have the footmen bring fresh hot water,” she muttered to the valet as she wrung out the cloth again. This time she placed it directly on the wound. Sometimes the infection could be drawn out by heat.

  Lord Caire stiffened at her touch, but otherwise he made no sign that he felt what must be awful pain.

  “Why does the touch of others cause you pain?” she asked him softly.

  “Might as well ask why a bird is attracted to the sky, madam,” he slurred. “It’s just the way I am.”

  “What about when you touch someone else?”

  He shrugged. “There is no pain as long as I am the initiator.”

  “And you were always thus?” She frowned at the cloth, pressing it into the wound. Despite the doctor’s philosophy, she’d always followed her mother’s teachings on wound healing, and Mama had not liked pus, “bonum” or not.

  Caire gasped and closed his eyes. “Yes.”

  She glanced quickly at his face before taking up the cloth and wiping away the liquid that had oozed from the wound. “You said before that there has never been anyone who didn’t cause you pain.”

  The words were a statement, but she meant them as a question, for she remembered his slight hesitation before.

  He was silent as she rinsed the cloth in the lukewarm water and reapplied it. For a moment, she thought he wouldn’t speak.

  Then he whispered, “I lied. There was Annelise.”

  Her head jerked up and she stared at him, feeling an odd spike of something that might’ve been jealousy. “Who is Annelise?”

  “Was.”

  “What?”

  He sighed. “Annelise was my younger sister. Five years younger. She took after our father in looks—a plain little thing with mousy brown hair and gray-brown eyes. She used to follow me about even though I told her… I told her…”

  His voice trailed away as Small silently replaced the basin of water with a fresh one. Temperance rinsed the cloth in it, the water so hot it reddened her hands. She laid the hot cloth against his wound and pressed, but he seemed not to even notice now.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Mmm?” Lord Caire murmured without opening his eyes.

  She leaned closer to him, staring at his long nose, his firm, almost cruel mouth. Surely such a sarcastic, nasty man could not be defeated by something as mundane as a putrid wound?

  Fear made her belly clench. “Caire!”

  “What?” he muttered irritably, half opening his eyes.

  She swallowed. “What did you tell Annelise?”

  His shook his head against the pillows. “She’d follow me, spy upon me when she thought I wasn’t watching, but she was so much younger than me. I always knew. And she would take my hand, even when I told her not to. Told her not to touch me. Yet her touch never hurt… never hurt…”

  Temperance reached out and did something she never would have done had he been in his right senses: She gently stroked back his beautiful silver-white hair from his forehead. It was soft, almost silken, beneath her fingers.

  “And what did you tell her?”

  His sapphire eyes suddenly opened wide, looking as lucid, as calm, as they had the day before he was hurt. “I told her to go away, and she did. She caught a fever not soon afterward and died. She was five and I was ten. Do not endow me with romantic virtue, Mrs. Dews. I have none.”

  She held his gaze for a moment, wanting to argue the point, wanting to comfort a little boy who’d lost his younger sister so long ago. But she straightened instead, withdrawing her hand from his hair. “I’m going to bathe your wound with strong spirits. It will hurt a great deal.”

  He smiled almost sweetly. “Of course.”

  And somehow, with the help of Small, she accomplished the horrible job. She bathed his wound in brandy, dried it, and dressed it once again, all the while conscious that she was causing him excruciating pain. By the time she’d finished, Lord Caire was breathing heavily under his covers, unconscious. Small looked disheveled, and Temperance was fighting sleep.

  “That’s done at least,” she whispered wearily as she helped the manservant gather the soiled cloths.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” the little valet said. He darted a worried glance at the bed and its inhabitant. “I don’t know what we would’ve done without you tonight.”

  “He is something of a handful, isn’t he?”

  “Indeed, ma’am.” The manservant’s words were fervent. “Would you like me to have the maids make up a room for you?”

  “I should go home.” Temperance stared at Lord Caire. His face was still red, and though she’d washed his brow, it was beaded with sweat again.

  “If you’ll pardon me, ma’am,” Small said. “He might need you in the night, and in any case it’s very late for a lady to be traveling out alone.”

  “’Tis, isn’t it?” she murmured, grateful for the excuse.

  “I’ll have Cook make a tray for you,” Small said.

  “Thank you,” Temperance replied as the manservant slipped from the room. She sank into a tall chair pulled close to the bed and propped her head against her fist, meaning to merely rest her eyes while the little valet fetched her supper.

  When Temperance next woke, the fire had died low on the grate. Only a single guttering candle on the bedside table gave light to the room. She stretched a little, wincing at the ache in her neck and shoulders from having slept in such an awkward position, and glanced at the bed. Somehow she wasn’t surprised to find glittering blue eyes watching her.

  “What was he like,” Lord Caire asked softly, “your paragon of a husband?”

  She knew she should refuse to answer him, that the question was far too personal, but somehow, here in the depths of night, it seemed reasonable and right.

  “He was tall, with dark hair,” she whispered, remembering that long-ago face. It had been so familiar once and was so faded now. She closed her eyes, concentrating. It seemed so wrong to forget Benjamin and all he was. “His eyes were a lovely dark brown. He had a scar on his chin from a fall as a boy, and he had a way of stretching his fingers and gesturing with his hands when he talked that seemed elegant to me. He was very intelligent, very proper, and very kind.”

  “How ghastly,” he said. “He sounds a prig.”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “Did he make you laugh?” he asked quietly, his voice roughened from sleep or pain. “Did he whisper things in your ear that made you blush? Did his touch send shivers down your back?”

  She inhaled sharply at his rude, too-personal questions.

  But he continued, his voice impossibly de
ep now. “Did you grow wet when he looked at you?”

  “Stop it!” she cried, her voice loud in the room. “Please, stop it.”

  Caire merely watched her, his eyes much too knowing, as if he knew she’d grown wet—but at his look, not at the old memories of her husband.

  She inhaled. “He was a good man—a wonderful man—and I didn’t deserve him.”

  Lord Caire closed his eyes and for a moment seemed to have fallen asleep. Then he murmured, “I’ve never been married, but I think it would be quite awful to have to deserve one’s spouse.”

  She looked away from him. This subject made her chest ache, brought a depressing melancholy to her brain.

  “Were you in love with him,” Lord Caire asked, “this husband you didn’t deserve?”

  And whether it was because she still half drifted in dreams or because they were curiously intimate in the near dark, she answered truthfully. “No. I loved him, but I was never in love with him.”

  The room suddenly brightened, all at once it seemed, and she realized that the dawn had arrived unnoticed while they talked.

  “It’s a new day,” Temperance said stupidly.

  “Yes, it is,” Lord Caire replied, and the satisfaction in his voice made her shiver.

  Chapter Eight

  Well! This was a very unfortunate turn of events for poor Meg, for the dungeons of King Lockedheart were not very pleasant. The walls dripped with fetid water, and rats and other vermin skittered across the corridors. There was no light and no heat, and in the distance could be heard the cries of the other sad inhabitants of that place. Things looked very desperate, but as Meg had never had it very easy in her life, she resolved to face this crisis with as much bravery as she could summon.

  And she vowed as well that whatever happened, she would tell nothing but the truth….

  —from King Lockedheart

  Temperance rode home in Lord Caire’s carriage as the new day dawned on London. She fell asleep during the journey, waking only when the carriage halted at the end of Maiden Lane. In fact, she was so exhausted from tending Caire that the consequences of a night spent away from home never even occurred to her until they descended like a great heavy boulder on her head when she entered the home.

  “Where,” Concord, her eldest brother, inquired in a deeply disapproving voice, “have you been?”

  Perhaps it was unfair to compare Concord to a great boulder, but finding him just inside the foundling home’s doorway was something of a shock. He nearly filled the hallway, his displeasure palpable.

  “I… uh,” Temperance stuttered, not very eloquently.

  Concord frowned heavily, his bushy gray and brown eyebrows meeting over his stern nose. “If you were held against your will by this aristocrat Winter has told us about, we will seek reparations.”

  “We’ll beat his bloody face in is what we’ll do,” Asa, her next eldest brother, growled from behind Concord.

  Temperance blinked at the sight of Asa. She hadn’t seen him in months. Oh, dear, this was not good. Asa and Concord rarely agreed on anything and, in fact, had made pains to speak to each other as little as possible for years. This morning, however, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the narrow foundling home hallway, united in their anger toward Caire—and their unhappiness with her. Concord was the taller of the two, his graying brown hair clubbed back and, like all her brothers, unpowdered.

  Asa’s hair, in contrast, was a deep golden-brown, the color of a lion, and though he was several inches shorter than Concord, his broad shoulders nearly took up the width of the hall. His shirt and coat strained over his chest as if he did some physical labor every day of his life. Yet no one in the family knew exactly how Asa earned his living, and he was quite vague when asked. Temperance had long suspected that her other brothers feared to press him too closely in case his work was not entirely respectable.

  “Lord Caire did not hold me against my will,” she said now.

  Concord scowled. “Then what were you doing at his house all night?”

  “Lord Caire was ill. I merely stayed to help nurse him.”

  “Ill in what way?” Asa asked.

  Temperance glanced down the hallway, toward the kitchen behind her brothers. Where was Winter?

  “He had an infection,” she said cautiously.

  Asa’s green eyes sharpened. “An infection of what?”

  “A shoulder wound.”

  Her brothers exchanged a glance.

  “And how was he wounded?” Concord rumbled.

  Temperance winced. “He was attacked the other night by footpads. One stabbed him in the shoulder.”

  For a moment, both of her brothers merely stared at her, and then Concord’s eyes narrowed. “You spent the night with an aristocrat who gets himself attacked by footpads.”

  “It was hardly his fault,” Temperance protested.

  “Nevertheless,” Concord began pedantically.

  Fortunately, Asa interrupted him. “She looks half dead, Con. Let’s continue this discussion in the kitchen.”

  Concord glared at his younger brother, and Temperance thought he might refuse out of sheer contrariness. Then he pursed his lips. “Very well.”

  He turned and stomped off down the hall. Asa gestured for Temperance to precede him. His eyes were unreadable. Temperance inhaled, wishing she could have this confrontation when she’d had more sleep.

  The foundling home kitchen was usually bustling in the morning—it was only a little after eight of the clock—but today only a single figure sat at the long table.

  Temperance stopped short in the doorway, staring at Winter. “Why aren’t you at the school?”

  He looked at her, his dark brown eyes shadowed. “I closed the school today after searching all night for you.”

  “Oh, Winter, I am so sorry.” Guilt swept away what little vigor she still had. Temperance sank into one of the kitchen chairs. “I couldn’t leave him last night, truly. He had no one to help him.”

  Concord snorted not very nicely. “An aristocrat? His home wasn’t crawling with servants to tend him?”

  “There were servants, yes, but no one to ca—” She almost said care for him, but at the last second Temperance bit back the words. “No one to take charge.”

  Asa looked thoughtfully at her, as if he knew the word she’d cut off.

  But Concord merely pulled at his chin, a habit he had when distressed. “Why have you sought the company of this man in the first place?”

  Her head felt achy and dull. She stared at Winter, trying to think of some probable excuse for her friendship with Lord Caire. But in the end she was simply too tired to prevaricate.

  “He took me to a musicale last night,” Temperance said. “I wanted to meet someone we could persuade to become a patron for the home. We are in need of funds to continue to keep the home open.”

  She glanced at Winter as she ended her explanation and saw him close his eyes. Asa’s mouth had compressed while Concord was frowning thunderously. There was a heavy silence.

  Then Concord spoke. “Why haven’t you informed us of your distress?”

  “Because we knew you would want to help, brother, even if you could ill afford to do so,” Winter said quietly.

  “And me?” Asa said softly.

  Winter looked at him mutely. Though they had debated asking Concord for help, they had never once discussed going to Asa.

  “You never seemed interested in the home,” Temperance said softly. “When Father would talk of it, you almost scoffed. How were Winter and I to know that you might help us?”

  “Well, I would help you, despite what you think of me, but at the moment I’m somewhat short of funds. In another three months perhaps—”

  “We don’t have three months,” Winter stated.

  Asa shook his head, a lock of tawny brown hair falling from his queue, and went to stand by the fire, separating himself from their family as he always seemed to do.

  Concord turned back to Winter. “And you al
lowed this?”

  “I did not like it,” Winter replied shortly.

  “Yet you let our sister whore herself for this home.”

  Temperance gasped, feeling as if her brother had slapped her across the face. Winter was on his feet, speaking in a grim voice to Concord and Asa was shouting, but all she heard was a muffled roar in her ears. Did Concord truly think her a whore? Was her greatest shame written on her face for all to see? Perhaps that was why Caire had made his suggestive comments. Perhaps he’d seen with one glance that she could be so easily corrupted.

  She covered her mouth with a shaking hand.

  “Enough!” Asa had raised his voice to flatten his brothers’ argument. “Whether Winter is at fault or not, Temperance is near fainting with fatigue. Let us send her to bed while we discuss this further. Whatever happens, it’s obvious that she can no longer see this Lord Caire.”

  “Agreed,” Winter said, though he would not look at Concord.

  “Naturally not,” her elder brother said ponderously.

  Well, this was wonderful—all her brothers were in agreement for once. Temperance almost felt a pang of guilt. “No.”

  “What?” Asa stared at her.

  She rose from the table, placing her palms flat against the surface to steady herself. Any sign of weakness on this point would be fatal. “No, I will not stop seeing Lord Caire. No, I will not give up my search for a patron.”

  “Temperance,” Winter murmured in warning.

  “No.” She shook her head. “If my reputation has already been compromised as Concord says, then what is the point in giving any of it up? The home needs a patron to survive. You all may protest Lord Caire and my virtue, but you cannot argue that fact. Furthermore, none of you have a solution for the problem, do you?”

  She looked from Winter’s weary, lined face to Asa’s watchful eyes, and finally to Concord’s disapproving countenance.

  “Do you?” she demanded again softly.

  Concord abruptly stamped from the room.

  She let out her breath, feeling almost giddy. “That’s answer enough, I think. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m to bed.”