“Again?” he murmured. “You have quite a thirst for a child, Lady Forth.”
“I have a thirst for my husband, and four years to make up for.”
“I can help with that,” he said, and came over her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
His wife was gambling with criminals—and winning.
“Once more,” she crowed, and threw down her cards.
A disbelieving groan traveled the rest of the table. Such was the group’s reputation, in this smoky tavern in Tiger’s Bay, that the sound of their disapproval sent a visible flinch through the room. Several men standing by the bar began to inch toward the door.
“That’s the third game she’s won,” grumbled Jackson. “If I didn’t know you traveled armed, Lock, I might wonder at her honesty.”
“But I do travel armed,” Liam murmured.
Jackson grunted.
“I have hearing to match my card skills,” his wife said sweetly. “And I, too, travel armed. So you may address your aspersions to me directly—although, I confess, I am not in the practice of entertaining complaints from sore losers.”
The other men burst into laughter, and after a grudging moment, Jackson grinned, too.
“Well, that’s another round on me, then,” he said as he stood. “Lads? I know the lady will have another scotch.”
“Indeed she won’t,” Liam said, rising and pulling Anna to her feet. They had already lingered an hour longer than he was comfortable. That she’d managed to convince him to bring her along spoke a great deal of her powers of persuasion, and very little of his good judgment. This was a den of thieves and cutthroats; that she fitted in so well should probably concern him.
“What a pity,” Anna said. “Must we go so soon?”
“Unless you mean to bankrupt them entirely, yes. Jackson, will you walk us out? I need a word.”
Jackson amiably strolled after them. On the street, Liam handed Anna into the carriage before saying in a low voice, “Any news on how he’s still solvent?” Stephen’s newest railway company had collapsed in the wake of the new law’s introduction, investors losing faith and selling in droves. By now, his financiers should have called in their loans. But no news of bankruptcy had reached Liam’s ears.
Jackson frowned, then turned his head aside to spit into the gutter—which, in this corner of London, took up half the street, having not been repaired since a Hanover sat the throne. “Seems a puzzle,” he said. “Men come and go, mind you—a hive of industry, over there. But none of them is creditors, by my reckoning, which means he’s still got money to pay them somehow, even if by all rights he shouldn’t.”
A great impatience swelled through Liam. He tamped it down with a full, long breath.
“All right,” he said. “You’ll let me know if you hear anything.”
“The very moment.” As Liam turned away, Jackson caught his arm. “Fine piece,” he said, nodding toward the coach.
Liam smiled grimly. “Not a piece, Jackson. My wife.”
“Ah, like that, is it?” Jackson released him, looking cross. “Right-o. Sometimes I forget, you toffs get quite touchy. Tug my forelock, should I, when I speak to you now?”
Liam paused. These moments, in which his own station intruded into friendships that had been born in blood and dirt—in a time when he’d been a prisoner, same as the others—came more frequently now. And he was not sure what to do. He had straddled two worlds for almost a year now, and until last week, he had not realized the great effort it required.
That evening, Anna in his bed—her mouth on his scars, her forbidding of shame—seemed to have broken whatever scaffolding had supported him. Now, suddenly, he felt the weaknesses trembling through his facade. He did not know how to speak to Jackson anymore. He did not know how to speak to her. He looked in the mirror and no longer knew whether his reflection deserved his contempt—or his forgiveness.
He thought it was possible, perhaps, that this crumbling was the first step toward becoming whole again.
“It’s not like that,” he said at last, too late. And then he grinned. “Hell, Jackson, you saw her inside—she stomped you at whist. She’d probably take it as a compliment to be called a ‘fine piece.’ ”
The window in the brougham slammed open. “Yes,” came Anna’s voice. “I would.”
The window slammed shut again, and Jackson chuckled.
“Yeah,” he said. “I see why you were desperate to make it home.” He slapped Liam on the shoulder. “Mad lunatic that you were. Give her my thanks for it. I guess we all owe her a debt.” With a nod and a wink, he went back into the tavern.
“You’ve become an eavesdropper,” Liam said as he joined his wife inside the coach.
“Oh, I always was one,” she said, twinkling at him. “Auntie Liz tried to break me of the habit, but Auntie May encouraged it—she paid me a shilling for every ill remark that I heard Auntie Liz make about her.”
He laughed—without hesitation, genuinely. That reflex had come back almost overnight, it seemed. Perhaps he was indulging it too much; he had a reputation for discerning wit, and would look fatuous now in company.
But the risk did not concern him. It seemed well worth the reward.
In the brief silence, she had turned away to make a study of the sights out the window. On their way here, the poverty in these slums, the broken windows stuffed with rags and newspapers, the ragged children scattering from their games of knucklebone to make way for the coach, had disturbed her. “I have seen this kind of poverty in Edinburgh,” she’d said, “but I imagined here, in the heart of the kingdom, so close to the Queen, there might be less of it.”
Now, however, her frown seemed to arise from a different concern. “I liked those men very much,” she said slowly. “But I don’t think I would wish to meet them after dark, if they did not look on me already as a friend.”
“They do,” he said. “You’re my wife. Should you ever stand in need, you may count on them as brothers.”
“Yes, but . . .”
He waited uneasily. She was not a woman to guard her words to save offense, which meant she must be deciding whether or not she wanted to know the answer to her stirring curiosity.
He was not going to lie to her about anything now. But he still doubted if all his answers would prove acceptable to her.
Better to know sooner than later. “Ask,” he said softly.
“I thought Elland a place where rich men sent their enemies. But those men—everyone in that pub knew them. It seemed like they weren’t newcomers. Like they had had a longstanding hold on this area, one not strictly . . . legal.”
“You’re perceptive.” Jackson had been transported for attempted murder. Unlike so many others, he’d never bothered to declare his innocence on the charge. “Marlowe’s trade in paid abductions didn’t keep his mines adequately stocked with laborers. There were legitimate convicts—the ones who caused trouble in their official assignments—who ended up in Elland.”
“What a devilish complex operation,” she murmured. “It is a pity that Marlowe did not receive the Queen’s justice.”
The remark darkened Liam’s mood. He did not want to dwell on the matter unless some course of remedy was at hand. Anyway, a much more pleasant subject sat across from him.
“Tell me,” he said, “was it your aunties who taught you to gamble, or your dozens of cousins?”
“Neither group. I learned that on the island.”
“Ah.” That made sense, of course. He remembered how friendly, on what intimate standing, she had seemed with the rough-spun Rawseyans. During that brief holiday he’d passed there, while falling in love with her, he’d watched her with amazement. Noblesse oblige had guided many a great lady to condescend to her tenants, but Anna’s manner with them had been warm, unaffected—that of an equal.
It occurred to him suddenly that she had the skill he was seeking. She moved between worlds, across cavernous divides, without effort.
“What is it?” she asked. “You have
a look on your face.”
“I’m marveling at you.”
She blushed. “A compliment! Quick, has your fever come back?” With a teasing smile, she came onto his bench to check his forehead, and he caught her hand and kissed it, then inhaled her deeply.
Wonder prickled over him. To take her in his arms so easily—to kiss her neck now, that secret spot found only by nudging aside her chignon, so redolent with the scent of her—it seemed bizarre and miraculous that he could do these things, all at once, without feeling a twist in his gut, fear of what she might discover about him. That this gift could be his, that she could be his, so suddenly, so completely, when for so long it had seemed an impossibility—
He could not grasp it.
He tried to grasp it as he sucked her earlobe and felt her squirm with pleasure. But on the heels of this amazed happiness, always, chased foreboding.
He tried to ignore it as she turned her face to his and their lips met and her tongue came into his mouth. Stephen had no doubt been behind the attempt to poison him, but that carelessness at the club—handing over his jacket at the cloakroom, when Stephen was about—would not be repeated. Anywhere Anna went alone, she was followed, unknowing, by one of his men. Stephen, too, was followed. They would not be allowed within a hundred yards of each other. She was safe.
And yet a sense of danger now lived just under his skin, flaring to acuity at odd times. For months, the provocation for it had been sudden noises, or thronging crowds, and once, the flutter of a bird at the periphery of his vision.
But the trigger had changed. The trigger now was this creeping peace, this startled sense of possibility, that came over him in her presence. She provoked it, by showing him how much he had to lose.
She tasted the shift in his mood, perhaps, for her mouth eased away from his. “What is it?” she murmured, stroking his hair back from his brow.
He kissed her again. It was not her place to be burdened with this nonsense. She could do nothing to help him dispel it. “Not boredom, I’ll promise you that.”
She laughed softly. “Yes, with the company you keep, boredom would be a rare blessing.”
“Thank you for coming. You fit in alarmingly well.”
“And you kept warning me I would regret it!”
“I had no idea that you had such chameleon skills. You must teach me.”
She laughed again, and laid her finger on his lower lip, a touch that riveted all his senses, and suggested far better entertainments than talk. “Be born as a woman, then—one of the few with a title in her own right, and a determination to oversee her own estates, and all sorts of masculine interests. That, I fear, is the best way to learn to be a chameleon. I have been called mannish, you know, and sometimes I think it’s true.”
“Mannish.” He pulled her close and spoke into her ear. “I will persuade you otherwise, shall I?”
“Yes, please,” she said, and hiked up her skirts to climb on top of him.
• • •
No man shows his true face on the honeymoon. So her auntie Liz had once pronounced sourly after quarreling again with her husband. The remark had come to Anna’s mind more than once in the last blissful week. It felt to her as though she and Liam at last were having a honeymoon, without ever leaving London.
He did nothing without her; she would not be kept out of anything. If he needed to meet with disreputable friends, fellow survivors, or nervous artists, she went with him. She would know everything, and allow nothing to be hidden. Honesty was the only way to proceed.
And to her surprise, he did not quarrel with her company. He had recovered fully from his illness, that mysterious sickness or poisoning, and carried about him that peculiarly abandoned and merry air of a man who had survived another close call with death.
In the mornings, they breakfasted together and discussed their hopes for the day, and made plans for amusement: the opera, drives through the park, visits to the Royal Academy, where Liam was advising on the upcoming exhibit.
In the late afternoons, when civilized people dressed in preparation for evenings out, they undressed each other, always in the light.
Later they dined together, often in private. Rarely he told her stories of the men in this household, the favors they had done him, the ways they had survived. More often they talked of her life during the past four years. Her labors on Rawsey had grown the community to almost two hundred, among them twenty children, who filled the schoolhouse with song each morning at half past eight. With the aid of new patent manures, the small oat and barley harvests had doubled. In a year or two, should the barley continue to flourish, some of the islanders hoped to create a distillery.
But Rawsey had not kept her entirely occupied; she had also seen to Liam’s lands, and not simply for duty’s sake. Fertile English soil made an ideal testing ground for experiments in agriculture. Liam listened with fascination as she recounted her trials—some failures, but mostly successes. She had done away with the potato crops, and he agreed to stay that course until five years had passed without further news of blight. Against the will of two of his stewards, Anna had also forced the introduction of a more modern scheme of crop rotation, and she recounted her battles to Liam’s amusement.
In these conversations, it began to seem to her that Liam had been a part of her last four years, even in his absence. His estates, the improvements she had made to them, the plans she’d nursed for the future: all of these things she had undertaken in his name, even if she had forced herself not to think of him.
Would an outsider have looked on these evenings with envy? Anna knew that some women would not find romance in the discussion of oats. But what an intoxication to speak of her chemical theories and agrarian strategies to a man who paid rapt attention, and asked intelligent questions that made her pause to think before replying. Oats, it seemed, could form the basis for all sorts of things: jokes, sly repartee, kisses, abrupt excursions to bed . . .
It all felt so easy. Too easy, perhaps. Liam was attentive, kind, ever ready to laugh—but when he imagined her attention elsewhere, she often caught a strange look on his face, distant and evacuated. Wherever his mind went, in such moments, was full of shadows. But he would never answer honestly when she asked about his thoughts. Indeed, his smile appeared so instantly then that she felt unsure if he had abandoned his masks after all.
So, from an instinct of self-preservation, she tried to caution herself as they assembled this new life together. He had not spoken of love, and she would not speak of it again until he did. They shared a bed, and meals, and lovely laughing discussions, and the piecemeal experiences that constituted mundane life. But the specter of his cousin overshadowed them, and after hearing all the measures Liam had undertaken to find proof of Stephen’s guilt, Anna began to worry that her own optimism had been ill founded. If no official justice could be had, then a bloodier justice would need to serve. But if he were caught, Liam’s execution of his cousin would cost his own life.
No. She would never let that happen—no matter what it took.
In the meantime, she tried to think on anything else. She tried to persuade Liam, with her body and her wit and various amusements around town, that life might be worth living without looking backward.
Perhaps he sensed the nature of her campaign. One afternoon, when she suggested another visit to the Royal Academy, he said, “And what of your interests, Anna?”
What of them? Her interests, her hopes, her anxieties at present centered squarely on him.
But she could not admit so. It might shatter the deceptive serene truce between them. And so, two hours later, she found herself at his side in the lecture hall of the Royal Agricultural Society, listening to a whole lot of nonsense from Sir Montgomery, the renowned chemist.
When her temper had heated to steaming, she leaned over and whispered in Liam’s ear, “This is absolute balderdash, I hope you know.”
He’d been listening with every sign of congenial interest, but looked over with a lif
ted brow. “Is it? How so?”
“Monsieur Boussingault has shown it to be nonsense that plants draw nitrogen solely from the air. But perhaps Sir Montgomery does not read French.”
“Shocking.”
“Isn’t it?”
Sir Montgomery opened the room to questions. Narrow eyed, Anna listened to an elderly gentleman rise to praise him, and then a balding young man, who wanted advice for visionaries whose genius was imperiled by want of patronage.
What a uniquely masculine concern, to fear oneself a neglected visionary! Anna’s snort drew the censorious looks of two men in the row ahead.
Liam laughed quietly. “Say something.”
“What? Me?”
“Yes, before you explode.”
She looked at him, aghast. “It would cause a furor.”
“Good. If he’s wrong, he deserves to hear so.”
“Of course he’s wrong. That’s beside the point. Do you note how many women are here today? And how many came alone?”
He glanced around. Three unaccompanied ladies sat in the back rows, each ramrod straight, as though being pricked by pins. They looked neither right nor left, their singular focus, Anna knew, trained sternly lest the gentlemen around them misunderstand their stray glances.
“What of it?” Liam asked. “Surely they’ll applaud your temerity.”
Perhaps they would. “But the presence of ladies is suffered here,” she whispered, “not celebrated. And if a woman today ruins this cheery bonhomie, why, that will be remembered tomorrow—and woe be the women who walk in then and feel the chill that greets them.”
“Or perhaps they’ll feel more emboldened,” he countered. “Having seen proof that a woman’s question matters.”
She hesitated. Some would no doubt feel emboldened. But it was the others—for instance, that young blonde in the back, who had crept in so fearfully—who concerned her. It took courage to enter this room, anticipating the press of male scrutiny, the amusement or even exasperation occasioned by a lady’s presence. Any action that would increase that exasperation, or tip it into hostility, would not do women favors, particularly for the less brave among them.