скачать книгу бесплатно
He was almost tender as he soothed her and whispered meaningless words of comfort as he felt the dry sobs that shook her, for all her faint attempts to put the usual armour of indifference back in place.
Chapter Seven (#ulink_405fbfc9-3e20-525a-9b59-c56799755fb5)
‘I can see how a lady like you might be horrified by the bare notion of bearing my child, but I promise it won’t be as bad as you think, Louisa. We will contrive to look after it somehow between us, and even if I’m not the husband you would have chosen, I’ll try to be an easy one on you and a good father to our children, whenever they should come.’ Hugh Darke was promising her all the time she tried to take in what had happened and how stupid she’d been to make him think he had to vow anything to her, let alone marriage.
‘You don’t understand,’ she wailed, ineffectually hitting a would-be fist against his rock-like chest as he tried to take her in his arms in an embrace of pure comfort that was so tempting she had to find a way to make him let her go.
‘I understand that you’re a lady and a very lately ex-virgin and I’m just a common sea captain, but I could say we’ve made our bed and now must lie on it, if only we’d ever got that far.’
‘It’s not that, and I’m not a lady anyway,’ she said vaguely, for it seemed as if they were moving through a dream and she was looking much further back at a reality he couldn’t even guess at.
‘That you are—the whole world knows Miss Alstone is a Diamond of the ton, and only the highest born and most beautiful in the land gain that accolade.’
‘The Ice Diamond, the Untouchable Alstone?’ she scorned incredulously. ‘You should be the first to pour scorn on that epithet from now on.’
‘I’ll call out any man who seeks to argue with your icy reputation in public, even while I’m enjoying the real, warm human woman in my bed,’ he reassured her and if she hadn’t been bound up in her own misery she would have surely relished his partisanship, as well as his apparent desire to revisit her bed, however makeshift it might prove to be.
‘I never wanted to make my début among the ton,’ she told him blankly, as if not quite sure who she was talking to and all of a sudden she felt him take her misery seriously and draw back to try to see her face in all this frustrating darkness. ‘I certainly never intend to marry and did everything I could to make that fact clear to my family. I would not accept any gentleman’s offer of marriage, could not,’ she explained desolately as if she was in the dock instead of his arms.
‘Since I’m in a very good position to know you were a very proper maiden lady, then why not, Miss Alstone?’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, call me Louisa,’ she demanded with a sudden return to her usual forthright manner and, for a brief moment, she felt horror recede and the world rock back on to its proper axis for the first time in years. Then it was back again, that old revulsion at herself, the familiar, terrible worthlessness of what she’d done, so long ago.
‘Why will you have no husband or child to love, Louisa?’ he demanded imperiously and suddenly she knew he had easily as much noble blood pumping round his body as she could claim to have inherited from the Earls of Carnwood.
‘I can’t tell you,’ she whispered, back in that nightmare. ‘Whatever will you think of me if I do?’
‘How can I say, until you actually tell me what troubles you so deeply? We can hardly say or think much worse of each other than we already have, now can we?’
‘No,’ she admitted hollowly, thinking back to all the names she had called him, all the harsh opinions he’d already voiced about her.
‘Then what does it matter to you what I think of you? If you won’t marry me and insist on bastardising our maybe child, then I’ll certainly think far worse of you than you currently do of yourself, I can safely promise you that much at least.’
‘How comforting,’ she managed to say almost lightly and decided he might as well know the worst about her, if only so he’d agree to walk away and forget her.
‘Tell me, it can’t be worse than a secret I can’t bring myself to tell you in return,’ he soothed ruefully, but she couldn’t imagine anything worse than her own dark misdeeds.
‘It was back in the years before I became a lady,’ she warned him.
‘Before you were born, you mean? I can’t say I approve of the axiom that the sins of the fathers are to be visited on the sons, or in this case the daughters, so I know that you were always a lady, my dear.’
‘My father certainly had a full hand of misdeeds to hand on, even if that was all he left us.’
‘So I have heard, but as I say, I can’t see why that ought to blight you, any more than it has your brother and sister.’
‘Only me,’ she said so low he had to bow his head to catch it and she felt him so close to her again that her heart seemed to ache over that last inch of space between them.
‘No, you’re an Alstone just as surely as they are. Your parentage is stamped all over the three of you for anyone to see.’
‘Oh, my mother was ever faithful to him—despite his rages and his false promises and the hundreds of ways in which he didn’t deserve her devotion. But once upon a time there were four of us children, and it’s my fault that there aren’t four of us any more.’
‘How can it be? You must have been a child yourself when you lost your brother or sister, for I never heard of another little Alstone going to live with your aunt and uncle after your parents’ deaths.’
‘I was thirteen years old when Maria and I went to our uncle’s house to be turned from little savages into proper ladies, at least according to him. Maria was sixteen and eager to please, as well as good and dutiful, so she found it far easier to be “civilised” than I did and settled to it without complaint.’
‘Which you most certainly did not, Louisa, if I know anything about you at all,’ he said with a smile in his voice that made her knees weak. Again she longed to breach that small gap and lean into the comfort he was offering, but somehow forced herself not to. ‘You were a child and no wonder if you were rebellious,’ he continued, her unexpected advocate. ‘You’re an Alstone when all’s said and done, are you not? I never came across one yet who wasn’t as proud as the devil and impatient of the rules—apart from your sister, of course. Even I can see that Mrs Heathcote is almost as good as she is lovely and perhaps provides the exception to prove the rule.’
Another man who had evidently fallen very willingly under her lovely blonde sister’s gentle spell, Louisa decided with unaccustomed bitterness and hated herself all over again. ‘Aye, Maria is the best of us wicked Alstones,’ she said, ‘and I am the worst—I carry my father’s loathsome stamp right through me.’
‘Don’t talk such damnable nonsense, woman, you have the Alstone looks and believe me, they are quite spectacular enough for the rest of us mere mortals to cope with. There’s a glorious portrait of the Lucinda Alstone rumour insists enchanted Charles the Second even more than usual in the Royal Collection and you can believe me, because I’ve seen it, that you’re even lovelier than she was. It’s lucky I found you before Prinny did, really,’ he added and she almost smiled at the absurdity of his cocky reassurance.
‘Oh, really—lucky for whom exactly?’
‘Me, of course, since you’re going to marry me. For him as well, I suppose, since I won’t have to threaten him with laissez-majesty when I go after him with my horse pistols for leering at my wife, so long as he never has the chance to leer at you in the first place.’
‘How do you know he hasn’t done so already?’
‘Has he, then?’
‘Just a little, but he called me a pretty child and tickled me under the chin before Lady Hertford became restless and dragged him away.’
‘Sensible female,’ he approved smugly and she felt the comfort of normality he was trying to create for her and also a lurch of feeling she hadn’t armed herself against. Dangerous, she decided with a shiver, and sat a little straighter, almost next to him as she was.
‘They say he was once handsome and quite dashing,’ she mused so that he’d hopefully forget he’d been trying to plumb her deepest, darkest secrets.
‘According to my mother, he was as pretty a prince as you’d find in any fairy tale, until he became so fat and petulant you can’t help but wonder if he’d have been better finding something to do, besides feel sorry for himself.’
‘You know a lot about him,’ she said suspiciously.
‘Any Londoner in town when he was still Prince Florizel, and not fat as an alderman, could tell you that much.’
‘But your mama wasn’t just a London bystander, was she, Captain?’
‘Never mind my mother, we were discussing yours.’
She sighed deeply and felt the shadow of the past loom until even the deep darkness of this windowless cavern seemed to be touched by it.
‘She was far more beautiful than I am in her youth, but stubborn as any mule and somehow saw some quality in my father nobody else ever did. Mama never raged about her reduced circumstances or let us children think we were in any way less because we didn’t have servants and fine clothes, or aught but a few second-hand books she managed to squirrel away from my father somehow or another. I deplore her blindness towards my father, for there was never a more selfish or ruthlessly vain man put on this earth than Bevis Alstone, but I can’t bring myself to blame her for it, because she genuinely loved him. In the end I think she thought of him as a particularly naughty child.’
‘How humiliating for him,’ he said gently and she suddenly supposed it had been, so perhaps it was an unfortunate marriage on both sides and her mother would have been far better loving a better man and he a worse woman.
‘He didn’t kill her, though, I did that,’ she finally said bleakly. ‘And Peter,’ she added as if purging her soul of all her bitter crimes at once.
‘Of course you didn’t,’ he told her before she could add another word.
‘How do you know?’ she asked indignantly, almost as if she had to defend her right to the worst crime a human could commit against another of her kind.
‘You haven’t got it in you to harm a newborn kitten, let alone a woman you obviously loved and any kind of brother, even if he took after your sire in every vice available to him, which I doubt, since the rest of you certainly do not.’
‘Well, he didn’t, anyway. Peter was a dear, good boy; if he was a little slower than the rest of us, he loved more to make up for it. You never came across a more endearing soul than him and even the thieves and thugs in our near neighbourhood wouldn’t have hurt him, although we only lived on the edges of a rookery and Kit and I would never have taken him inside for fear of what they would do to him there. He was five years younger than me, so Kit and Ben and I ran riot and played catch-me-if-you-can through St Giles while Maria and Peter stayed home with Mama and minded their lessons.’
‘And Kit is five years older than you at the very least, so you were not running wild with him at thirteen years old, were you?’
‘No.’ She shook her head slowly, shuddering at the thought of what she’d done and why. ‘He left for the sea when I was seven or eight, but whenever he was home I’d follow him everywhere. Even he stopped trying to prevent me doing so, once he realised I could climb like a monkey and run as fast as the wind from any pursuit, so there really wasn’t much point in him trying to stop me when he knew I’d get out anyway, and find it all the more sport to track him and Ben down when I did. I hated the times he and Ben were at sea and how I hated my father for reducing us all to such straits that Kit couldn’t go to school as Mama longed for him to do. I couldn’t endure the thought that Kit might be lost at sea, while Papa gamed and drank and demanded good food and warm clothes, even if we had to go without so he could present a smooth face to so-called “good” society. I’ve since discovered anything remotely akin to society turned its back years before, but at the time I hated “society” almost as much as I hated the gaming hells for letting him in.’
‘Understandable in the circumstances,’ Hugh Darke said.
‘I was worse than he was, easily as selfish as he was,’ she condemned herself. ‘Anything Mama asked me to do, I ignored. Any task I had to perform because we were too poor for any of us to be idle, I did with ill grace and escaped from the boarding house my mother ran as soon as I could. Then I went into the rookeries and the mean streets around them, so I could play at being all the things girls and boys my own age were forced to do in order to put food in their bellies.’
‘In your shoes, I’d have done the same.’
‘You’d have been off to sea with Kit and Ben and left me more alone than ever, in my own eyes at least.’
‘Well, if I’d been born a girl I dare say I’d have followed in your footsteps, then,’ he assured her with a smile in his voice she suddenly wished she could see.
‘You’re a better man than me,’ she said on the whisper of a laugh. ‘Make that a better woman,’ she added; for a moment, none of it felt bad after all.
‘Best make it neither. I’m very glad I’m a man and you’re a woman, but I still know I’d have felt as frustrated and rebellious in your situation as you did, Louisa Alstone. You’re spirited and clever and if you managed to survive alone in such a harsh world, then you’re evidently extremely resourceful as well.’
‘Don’t make me into someone better than I deserve, Captain,’ she cautioned.
‘And don’t make yourself into your own demon.’
‘No need for that, I killed Peter and Mama,’ she remembered bleakly and all temptation to take herself at his inflated value disappeared.
‘How?’ he asked and she marvelled that he didn’t draw his arms away or try to set her at arm’s length.
‘Kit and Ben had gone back to sea again and I hated losing their company and the exciting adventures we had, so I ran off one day when I’d finished my daily ration of sewing and chores about the house. It was high summer and the nights were almost as light as the days, so I climbed out of a bedroom window and stayed away all night. I found a roof in Mayfair to sleep on and it was a good deal cooler and more comfortable than our bedroom under the eaves in a rotten old house that should have been pulled down half a century ago. Then I decided to run back through the streets before the world was awake, just for the devilment of it. Except this time I ran through the wrong ones and picked up the typhus fever,’ she said, then stared blankly into the darkness as she finished her tale. ‘It killed Peter first and then I don’t think Mama could fight it for her grief at losing him. Maria was only ill for a couple of days and I recovered in time to know what I’d done and wish I hadn’t. Maria and I bungled along somehow, running the boarding house as best we could with Mrs Calhoun and Coste’s help, and Papa came home every now and again when he had nowhere else to go. Then Kit came home with his share of a cargo in his pocket and arranged for Maria and me to live with our uncle and his wife. So Kit has paid for our keep and education ever since and I stayed there and tried to make up for the terrible thing I did, but nothing could wipe out that particular sin.’
‘You did nothing wrong, you idiotic woman. I can understand a grieving child taking on a terrible burden of guilt, but surely not even you are stubborn enough to cling to it now, in the face of all logic and mature consideration?’
She shrugged, knowing he couldn’t see her, but they were so close she could feel the frustration come off him. It was both unexpected and kind of him to try to absolve her of guilt. It also confirmed he had all the instincts, as well as the upbringing, of the gentleman she now knew him to be.
‘If I had only stayed at home as I should have done that day, Mama and Peter would probably still be alive today,’ she said sadly.
‘And if any number of things in history had happened in a different order we might not be standing here tonight, futilely discussing ifs and maybes. You know as well as I do that disease is rife in the slums of this city, especially in the summer, and anyone could have given them that illness. Would you expect the butcher or baker or candlestick-maker to carry a burden of guilt for the rest of their lives if they had carried it into your home?’
‘No, but they would have spread it in innocence, not after disobeying every rule my mother tried to lay down for my safety and well-being and probably worrying her sleepless all night as well.’
‘So you were headstrong and difficult—what’s new about that, Louisa?’ he asked impatiently and for some reason that made her consider his words more seriously than sympathy might have done.
‘Not much,’ she finally admitted as if it came as a shock.
He chuckled and she kicked herself silently for feeling a warm glow threaten to run through her at the deep, masculine sound of it. ‘I doubt very much those who love you would have you any other than as you are, despite your many faults,’ he told her almost gently.
‘But Peter’s dead,’ she told him tragically and if he couldn’t hear the tears in her voice at the very thought of her loving little brother, now six years in his grave, she certainly could and bit her lip to try to hold them back.
‘And just how do you think your brother Kit and Ben Shaw would have felt if they came home to find you or your sister gone as well? Such epidemics are no respecters of what is fair and unfair, Louisa. None of you deserved to die or to bear blame for deaths that happened because the poor live in little better than open sewers at the heart of this fair city. Blame the aldermen and government ministers who allow such abject poverty to thrive in what’s supposed to be the most advanced nation in the world, but don’t be arrogant enough to take the blame yourself. And don’t you think your mother would hate to hear you now? It sounds to me as if she loved her children very much, so she’d certainly not want to hear you talk like a fool and refuse to bear children yourself, just because she’s not here any more and your little brother couldn’t fight a desperate and dangerous illness that can just as easily take strong men in the prime of their lives.’
‘I still shouldn’t have gone.’
‘No, but all the other times you climbed out of your window and ran wild through the streets you probably should have been sewing samplers or minding your books. It sounds like the natural reaction of a spirited girl, denied the pleasures and luxuries of the life you should have had, if your father wasn’t selfish and shallow and self-obsessed. Taking the burden of guilt for what happened when it clearly belongs elsewhere is arrogant, Louisa. All you were guilty of was a childish rebellion that you would have grown out of, once your brother was able to provide you and your family with the sort of life you should have lived from the outset.’
‘He was so sad, Hugh,’ she confided with a sniff to hold back her tears that he somehow found deeply touching. ‘At night when he thought Maria and I were in bed and asleep I would hear him weep for them. Then Papa came home one night, drunk as usual, and they argued and raged at each other until Papa stormed off into the night and swore not to come home again until Kit was back at sea. They found his body floating in the Thames two days later and only my sister was ever soft-hearted enough to think he’d drowned himself out of grief for my mother, when he was so drunk he probably couldn’t tell the difference between high water and dry land. Yet it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t argued with Kit and I hadn’t done what I did.’
‘And no doubt Kit feels guilty about that as well, being made in the same stubborn, ridiculous mould as you and the rest of the Earl of Carnwood’s rackety family. There’s no need for you to take on his regrets as well as your own, since I never met a man more able to own his sins and omissions than Christopher Alstone.’
‘I suppose you could be right.’
‘Of course I am. Now, kindly inform me what you were planning to do to me once you had me guyed up in that ridiculous disguise and let’s have done with your imagined sins.’
‘That’s it? I am to consider myself absolved? You should have been a priest.’
‘Maybe not,’ he said with a laugh that would have been self-mocking if he wasn’t so busy mocking her. ‘But nothing you did or didn’t do in the past has made you unfit to be a mother, Louisa. Probably just as well, since we’re going to be wed and will doubtless bed each other at regular intervals, very likely before we get to the altar as well if you keep glaring at me like that,’ he threatened half-seriously.
‘How do you know I’m glaring at you?’ she asked haughtily.
‘Instinct,’ he told her succinctly. ‘I can’t promise you much, but I will promise not to treat you as shabbily as your father did your mother,’ he added gruffly.
‘That would be nice of you, if I had the least intention of marrying you.’
‘You will have to, my girl, since I refuse to spend the next three months or so not meeting your brother’s eyes or hiding from Ben Shaw’s mighty wrath while we wait for you to decide if I’ve just got you pregnant or not. Consider it the wages of sin and take that guilt on your shoulders if you must, but at least let’s have no more Cheltenham tragedies while you wait it out as my wife instead.’
‘So far I hear only what you want and nothing about me, but the answer to your question about the disguise is that I don’t really know. I can’t go back to Kit’s house because my enemies will be looking for me by now, and I wanted to get you away from the man who’s trying to trap you until we could defeat him somehow, which was all very stupid of me, I suppose.’
‘Undoubtedly it was,’ he agreed gruffly.
‘You could probably go back there safely yourself,’ she encouraged him and felt his suspicion on the heavy air as clearly as if she could actually see his frown.
‘While you do what in the meantime?’
‘I have plenty of plans for my future. It’s you I don’t know what to do with.’
‘I think we just demonstrated that you know exactly what to do with me,’ he said, sounding as silkily lethal as he must when examining any of his crew brought in front of him to explain their sins.
‘And you dislike being thought fit for only one purpose as much as I do?’
‘When did I imply any such thing, woman?’
‘With every word you drawl at me as if you’re right and everything I say proves how bird-witted I am.’
‘Only when you’re talking rubbish,’ he muttered impatiently, as if driven to the edge of reason by addle-pated arguments, when she ought to accept his words as proven fact, then do as she was bid.
‘It’s hardly rubbish to say we’re both unsuited to marriage and even more so to marrying one another.’
‘Yes, it is. We’ll do very well in our marriage bed, something we just proved to each other beyond all reasonable doubt.’
‘So my doubts are unreasonable and that’s all there is to marriage?’ she asked with a theatrical wave at the coffee stacks she was quite glad he couldn’t see. The very thought of them made her blush now they were discussing seduction and his peculiar idea that it automatically led to marriage.
