A Lily Among Thorns, page 4
That pulled Solomon up short. Lord Blackthorne wasn’t going to believe that, was he? Solomon could barely believe she’d said it. He blinked again to dispel the images called up by her suggestive tone of voice. Definitely lacking in verisimilitude, he told himself.
But Lord Blackthorne’s jaw dropped, and Lady Serena’s smile widened. “Now get out before I have you tossed out.”
Lord Blackthorne gave them the look of a cornered wolf. “I want him gone or I shall take steps. I give you two weeks. Good night.” With that Parthian shot he stormed out.
They stood staring at each other for a moment. Lady Serena’s smile was gone, but there was something warm and tired in her expression that he’d never seen before. “Has anyone ever told you you’re beautiful when you’re angry?”
He gave an unsteady, surprised laugh, trying to slow the exhilarated pounding of his heart. He felt clean, like a lanced wound. “I don’t know what came over me. That is—it’s my best impression of my father giving a sermon. That’s his accent. My brother Elijah used to fall out of his chair laughing.”
She met his gaze and shook her head regretfully. “You show such a touching faith in my character that I’m almost loath to destroy it. You called me an honest woman. I’m not. I’m one of the most notorious ex-whores in London.” Her face showed perfect unconcern, but she didn’t appear to be breathing. He couldn’t believe that that was what she was worrying about, now, after her father’s threats. Did she care that much what he thought?
He grinned at her. “I know.”
She blinked. “You know?”
“I recognized you as soon as I saw you in the dark.”
Serena couldn’t believe it. He knew, and still he’d defended her.
Once, when she was eighteen and had done something new with her protector, and not liked it, she had lain in bed after he’d gone home and shivered in the dark and thought, No honest man will ever want me now.
She didn’t, generally, let herself dwell on things like that; there was no use moping over facts, and honest men could go hang. But that night she hadn’t been able to help herself. For days afterward, despite her best efforts, she had felt cold and miserable and damaged, somehow, inside—ruined.
Solomon wasn’t looking at her as if he thought she was ruined.
He’d done the same thing six years ago; he’d come into that awful place and looked at her as if he saw her, as if he wanted to see her. And that forced her to see him, and she didn’t want to. She couldn’t afford to, not when she needed all the energy she had for herself, simply to get through each moment.
“Why did you do it?” she asked. “Why did you give me the money?” She’d wanted to know for years; she focused on that. If she let herself think of Bedlam—she couldn’t think of it. She couldn’t.
He chewed on his lip. “Because you needed it?”
“Didn’t you?”
He laughed. “Yes, I did. It was my entire allowance for the quarter. But is it not written, ‘He that loveth wine and oil shall not be rich’?”
He said it as if it could be as simple as it seemed. He was a kind young man, and he’d been drunk, and she had needed it. Try as she might, she could not twist it into selfishness or lust, into something she understood; it unsettled her. “Did you regret it?”
“Of course.” He shrugged. “But not—I regretted it, but I didn’t want to change it.” He gave her a rueful half smile. She didn’t say anything, and the smile faded; his eyes dropped and he rubbed his thumb along the edge of his table of equipment. “I do wish I’d borrowed the money to buy my brother Elijah a birthday gift.”
She shrugged. “I’ve never understood the great fuss about birthdays.”
“He only had two more of them after that,” he said, and she felt abruptly cold. “And he gave me just the thing I wanted.”
“On his own birthday—” Halfway through the sentence she understood, but it was too late.
“Sorry, I—we were born on the same day,” he explained. “We were twins.”
She stood, frozen. She should say something. She had to say something. But she couldn’t think of anything. So this was why he’d lost weight, and why his freckles stood out starkly against his pale skin, and why he had that drawn, defeated look she’d steadfastly refused to be concerned about from the moment she’d seen him again.
“And now I’ve got to go on having birthday after birthday without him.” He looked up; the sweetness of his smile was foreign and incomprehensible, but she felt a piercing kinship at the self-derision in his eyes. “I always thought—I’d know if anything happened to him. I’d feel it. But that was rot. I had no idea. I was laughing or eating and he was dead. He bled in the dirt all alone.”
Serena had no idea what to do. I’m very sorry for your loss, she thought, dredging the polite courtesy up from God knew where. But she couldn’t say it, didn’t know how to make her tongue form the words. She was more helpless before his simple, ordinary need than she would have been before any display of mastery. For long, painful moments, the only sound was the rain on the roof and the cobblestones.
“How on earth did you end up at Mme Deveraux’s?” he asked, finally.
“I slept with the footman,” she told him, angrily conscious of her own failure.
“And your father kicked you out?” He shot a sharp, frowning glance at the door Lord Blackthorne had just walked out of.
There, he was doing it already. Trying to make her an abused innocent, searching for the heart of gold among her brass. “No, I left,” she said with a false, brilliant smile. “I became a whore to spite him.” It was about half true. She had left to go after Harry, the footman; she’d intended to marry him. Harry, however, had had no such intention. When she’d gone to the address he’d given her, he hadn’t been there, and his friends had refused to give her any information about his whereabouts at all.
She’d been starving by the time Mme Deveraux’s procurer approached her in the street. But it hadn’t only been desperation; she had signed her contract with a flourish, feeling hot and triumphant at the thought of what her father would say. She’d been an idiot.
Solomon didn’t say anything; he looked as if he saw through the smile. He was doing it again, seeing her, and she hated it. She was afraid of what he would see—and worse, that he wouldn’t like it. “I bought back my contract with your money,” she told him. “But I didn’t stop. I was the most expensive whore in London for a year, and no matter how high my rates were, there was always someone willing to offer more. I couldn’t have done it without you. How do you feel about that?”
He swallowed. “Lady—” He stopped, evidently realizing how stupid it was to speak formally after the conversation they’d just had. “Serena, I don’t know what you want me to say.”
She didn’t either. “I suppose I want you to know what to say.” Stupid, but true. “Fit for Bedlam, aren’t I?”
Black fear rose, then, from where it had been waiting. Her father could do it. He could really do it, and no sweet drunk boy would save her from that. Why now? He’d left her alone for years. She’d thought she was free of him, and instead he was like some deus ex machina who could walk in and out of her life whenever he pleased, handing down ultimatums and commands with no forewarning and no hope of escape.
She pressed her fist to her mouth. “I—I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, quite calmly, and left the room.
Solomon woke at eight o’clock, not at all refreshed. Serena, he knew, must be already awake and dealing with business, and he wanted to see how she was. He wanted to see her. Within twenty minutes he was dressed and hurrying down the back corridor to her office.
In his haste, he ran straight into a tall man in obviously Parisian tailoring. Annoyed at his own gracelessness—but making a mental note to experiment further with gilt thread and pocketflap shapes—he apologized and tried to move past.
To his surprise, the stranger’s dark eyes lit up and he embraced Solomon enthusiastically, talking in rapid French. “Thierry! Comme ça me fait plaisir de te revoir! Mais où est-ce que t’es parti, hein? Je m’inquiétais tant quand t’as disparu—”
Solomon disengaged himself and stood stock-still. Once, he’d been used to this—being approached by people he didn’t know and called by a name that wasn’t his. When Elijah was alive, it had usually annoyed him and sometimes entertained him enormously. Now it did neither.
Shortly after Elijah died, someone who hadn’t known yet had mistaken Solomon for his twin, and he’d gone along with it for a joke the way he sometimes had before, thinking—God, he’d been stupid—thinking that it might make him feel better. After five sentences he’d gone outside and been sick.
“Mais pourquoi tu ne réponds pas? T’es pas heureux de me voir?”
“I—I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.”
The man frowned, laughed, and ran his fingers through his dark hair, making it stand straight up. “You do not speak French!” he said in lightly accented English. “Thierry, you are teasing me! And me, I did not even know you speak English! Tiens, do not pretend not to know me any longer. I am not so sure I can bear it.”
He wanted to snap at the man, to tell him to go away and stop making Solomon feel like this. “I’m sorry, but it’s true,” he said gently. “You must have been a friend of my brother’s.”
The man stilled in a way that reminded Solomon a little of Serena. “Your brother?”
“Yes, my brother Elijah. He spoke French very well.”
The man’s dark eyes examined Solomon, suspicious at first and then merely disappointed. “No, I see you are not he. But it is his face, his voice: yes, his brother. I—did not know he was English.” He shook himself a little, and asked more cheerfully, “But Thierry—Elijah”—he pronounced it carefully—“you are his brother, you know where he is—how I can find him?”
Solomon looked away. “Elijah’s dead.”
“Pardon?” But from the tremor in his voice, Solomon thought the man had understood.
“He’s dead. I’m sorry.”
“Dead. As, he lives no more?”
Solomon nodded. How many more times would he have to say it?
All the blood drained from the man’s face. “I see. How did he die, if you please?”
“He was killed by—” Solomon was about to say the French, but thought better of it. “He was shot.”
The man’s lips parted, as if he himself had taken a bullet. “I see. Please, accept my condolences on the loss of your brother.”
“Thank you. How—how did you know him? Please, I’d like to hear—” Actually, he could imagine it easily. It would have been very like Elijah to meet the Frenchman by chance and see if he could pass himself off as French, and very like Elijah—who had always been announcing he would build a six—no, an eight—no, a twelve-story house of cards, and who had always laughed when it came tumbling down—to see how far he could take it. Apparently rather far.
“Well, after all, I did not know him very well.”
“But—”
“Mais non, I assure you, we did not meet but once or twice.”
“René!” Lady Serena’s voice, behind them, was more unabashedly happy than he’d ever heard it. Solomon felt a small, irrational pang of jealousy. “How charming to see you again. But what is the matter? You look queer as Dick’s hatband.”
“Nothing, ma petite sirène,” he said as she ushered the two of them into her office. “It will pass. I—only I knew this gentleman’s brother, a little, and he is dead, it appears.”
Serena stole a glance at Solomon. “Yes,” she said quietly. “He is.” They stood in silence for a few moments. “But I must introduce to you the gentleman who has taken your room. René, allow me to present Solomon Hathaway. Solomon, this is René, marquis du Sacreval and my erstwhile business partner.” She still sounded so damn happy and trying to hide it, like a child who thought she was too old to make a fuss about Christmas.
The marquis and Solomon evinced equal surprise—Solomon would have almost said the Frenchman looked unsettled. “Did you say Hattaway?” he asked, nose wrinkling. “How very English. And are you from Stratford?”
“Yes, Hathaway,” Solomon said. “Sorry about the t-h. No, it’s no relation to Shakespeare’s wife that I know. We’re from Shropshire.”
The marquis frowned and turned cajolingly to Serena. “You have given him my room, ma sirène? But I will be needing it.”
She shrugged. “If you’d sent me word you were coming I could have saved it for you, but as it is, I’ll hardly ask Solomon to move. You can have the apricot room if you like; it’s just across the hall.”
“He can have the room,” Solomon said, trying not to think of that connecting door. “It’s his, after all.”
Her eyes narrowed. “No, the room is mine. I’m happy to put René up free of charge at any time, but, as I’m sure he will acknowledge, I bought out his share in the Arms when he left for France.”
The marquis pressed his lips together, looking cornered. “It is that which I must speak to you about, ma sirène. I have not been able to recover my lands in France, Napoleon is back, alors, I am forced to return to your green island.”
Serena’s birthmark lifted hopefully. “You must be disappointed, but of course I’ll be delighted to sell you back any share of the Arms you care to buy, up to fifty percent, or to hire you on as my assistant for a fixed salary if you’d prefer.”
“I would be prepared to buy you out.”
The birthmark hunkered down. “Buy me out, René?” she asked. “You know I won’t leave the Arms.”
His gaze held hers unwaveringly. “You are sure that you do not want to consider it? I can give you double what we paid for it.”
Her happiness was snuffed out now like a candle, and as jealous as Solomon had been, he felt a pang at its loss. “René, what is this about? If you’re in trouble, you know I’ll help you, but as for leaving the Arms, it’s out of the question.”
He took a deep breath, then gave a slight Gallic shrug. “Is that any way to treat your husband, sirène?”
Chapter 3
Surely René hadn’t just said what Serena thought he’d said. “Doing it a bit too brown, René. My husband? Come, what is all this nonsense?” Surely it was a joke. Surely in a moment René would laugh and hold out his hands for her to clasp, and there was no need for her heart to stutter in her chest like that. No need at all.
René didn’t smile as he drew a paper from inside his coat. “It is not nonsense, sirène. Under your English law everything you have is legally mine. Even the Arms. Particularly the Arms.”
She had missed him so much, wanted him to come back for so long. She had been so happy to see him. She had been worried by his stricken look, and he wanted to take the Arms away from her.
She said, with a calm that frightened her, “Let me see that.” René handed her the paper without a word. The marriage lines looked undeniably genuine. Her signature was perfect.
Five years, she thought.
For five years she had lived at the Arms, had got up every morning at dawn to consult with Antoine on the menus and gone to bed late every night after doing the books. For five years she had worked to make the Arms a success, and more, a fixture of the London scene. And all of it meant nothing, because some forger had written Serena Ravenshaw married René du Sacreval on a piece of paper.
For five years she had been an independent woman with a reliable income. And she owed that, at the heart of it, to the two men standing in this room. Men had saved her, and men could destroy her. A woman couldn’t be independent, not really.
She’d been staring at the paper for far longer than the most careful examination required. She had to say something, but she very simply could not move. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t think.
Solomon came to her side and pried the piece of paper from her fingers, squeezing one of her hands as he did so. “Are you really married?” he murmured. She shook her head dumbly.
Solomon turned to René. “And if I should put it in the fire?”
“Then what of the parish register?”
She had always loved René’s voice; it had meant safety to her to hear it ringing out from the other side of the taproom. Now it sounded diabolical.
“How much does one have to pay the vicar of”—Solomon glanced at the paper—“Saint Andrew of the Cross to put false names in the register?” He was buying her time, hiding her weakness. It was the second time he’d had to do it.
René tsked. “Do not be foolish, dear boy. If those were false—which I do not admit, mind you—would I take a vicar into my confidence? In England they can have scruples, these men of the cloth.”
Serena spoke with an effort. “I thought I was inured to betrayal, but I must confess this somewhat surprises me. Where do you expect me to go, René?” Too late, she saw she’d made a play for his sympathy; she was a woman, bargaining from a position of weakness, and he and Solomon could both see it.
“Go home to your father, sirène,” René said gently. “Or take the money I am offering you.”
She laughed a little hysterically. “My father came here yesterday and threatened to lock me up in Bedlam.”
René closed his eyes. “I am sorry.” He really did sound sorry, very sorry; that made her angrier. “But—there is nothing I can do about that, chérie.”
Was that all he could say? Serena looked at René, at her oldest, dearest friend, and was possessed by a white-hot fury. As if from very far away, her voice said, “It hardly matters in any case, because I won’t be leaving. You have no next of kin, so as your widow, the Arms will revert to me. I shan’t like to see you hang, but one does what one must. Good day, René.”
His familiar lively features seemed carved out of harsh white stone. “It is not like you to make empty threats, sirène. Écoute, I will give you two weeks to reflect. If you decide to sell to me, you will be still an independent woman, and rich. I hope you will. But if you are not raisonnable, I will be forced to take this paper into a court of law. I will move my things into the apricot room while you decide.”
