Slightly Sinful (13 page)

"That took some courage," he said.

She continued to stare blankly at him. "They did not utter one word of reproach for the part I had played in their loss," she said. "They fumed and swore quite horribly about him and his villainy, but Bridget just hugged me tightly and wept over me. All she seemed able to think about was that I had been hurt, that I must be devastated to know how he had deceived me."

"And were you?" Alleyne asked.

"Perhaps my last shred of trust in men was shattered," she said, hunching her shoulders, "and that was certainly painful. But my feelings had not been deeply engaged. I had agreed to the marriage for other reasons than romantic ones. Now I can feel only embarrassment and incredulity that I did not see him for what he was."

"It would be best not to be too hard on yourself," he told her. "Flossie and Geraldine and the others did not suspect him of villainy either, and they are hardened, experienced women of the world. But I suppose you feel yourself deeply in their debt for all the money your former fiancé stole from them."

"Yes." She nodded. "But there is little I can do to help them. Our first plan to raise money to go after Mr. Crawley failed when I found you, and Flossie and Geraldine found a poor boy whose body was being plundered." She blushed and bit her lip. "We went out there to see what valuables we could find in the aftermath of the battle, but we came back with nothing."

"No!" He could not stop himself from laughing out loud. "I can just see it-three women striding off in search of plunder, only to discover that their hearts were too soft for the task. And so you found my naked body instead of treasure. Poor Miss York."

"I would rather have found you than treasure," she said, looking mortified.

"Thank you," he said, and grinned at her. Though he sobered somewhat when he remembered the cause of her disheveled, tumbled appearance.

Damn it, it ought never to have happened. What had possessed him? It was a rhetorical question if ever he had heard one, of course. It was obvious what had possessed him-lust.

"I wish I could pay them back everything," she said passionately. "I wish I could restore their dream. But I cannot. I will not inherit my jewels until I am twenty-five. Three years is an awfully long time to wait. I could have them before then, of course, if I were to marry with my uncle's approval, but I do not believe that is going to happen. It will be a long, long time before I trust any other man."

"Ah," he said, "Crawley's motive becomes clear. I suppose you told him about this condition of your inheritance?"

"Yes." She looked at him with a frown. "It was dreadfully stupid and gullible of me, was it not?"

"Dreadfully," he agreed, shifting position again.

"You are in pain," she said, frowning and focusing fully on him.

"A little discomfort," he admitted. "I have been engaging in the wrong sort of sport for my physical condition, I suppose. One might say that I am being served my just deserts."

"Your leg is hurting?" She jumped to her feet. "I will go and fetch fresh water and cleanse it and apply more salve and clean bandages. Let me see. Is it bleeding?"

But he held up a firm staying hand as she approached the bed.

"I think it would be altogether better for my peace of mind if you kept your distance, Miss York," he said. "Since we both seem agreed that what happened here between us tonight was a great mistake, and since it would appear that we were a disappointment to each other, it would be as well if we avoided any possibility of a repetition."

She stared at him wide-eyed for a few moments while color mounted in her cheeks. Then she turned and made for the door with almost ungainly haste, fumbled clumsily with the lock before it scraped back, and dashed from the room, closing the door none too quietly behind her.

Well, deuce take it, that had not been a very gentlemanly speech, had it? He had just informed a lady after her first sexual encounter that it had been a great mistake and that she had been a disappointment to him.

He was going to have some humble pie to eat tomorrow.

He dreaded the very thought of tomorrow.

CHAPTER VIII

A LLEYNE MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT HE HAD NOT slept all night if he had not woken in a panic early in the morning and tried to get out of bed before he remembered that he could not.

He had to reach the Namur Gates. She was waiting for him there, and he was terrified that she might be in grave danger.

Pain served the dual function of banishing the remnants of sleep and cutting off the dream-if it had been just a dream. He lay very still, one hand cupped over the throbbing wound in his thigh, the other gripping the bedcovers, and tried desperately to recapture it. Who was waiting for him? And why? What was the danger?

Was it just a dream?

Or was it a memory?

He gave up after a few minutes and tried for perhaps the hundredth time to piece together what had happened to him before he regained consciousness here in this house. He had been riding away from the Battle of Waterloo toward Brussels. At least, that was the direction he must assume he had been taking, since it must have been at the battle where he had been shot. There had been a letter. And there had been a woman waiting for him at the city gates.

But try as he would-and he tried until his face was wet with perspiration and his head began to throb-he could bring nothing more into focus. And there seemed no connection among the random details that might be real memories or might just as likely be mere dreams. If he had been fighting in the Battle of Waterloo, why would he have been riding north to keep a rendezvous with some woman? And why was the letter so important? Was it something she had written to him, summoning him to protect her from some danger? In the middle of a battle?

No, it made no sense whatsoever.

It was a relief to hear a knock on his door, though he did turn his head warily as it opened, half expecting that it would be Rachel York. He was not ready to face her yet. But it was Sergeant Strickland instead, shaving gear in his hands, a pair of crutches tucked under one arm, a broad grin on his face despite the bandages that still swathed one side of it.

"You are going to be up and mobile today, sir," he said after bidding Alleyne a cheerful good morning. He set down the shaving gear and propped the crutches against the foot of the bed. "Those will cheer you up. I'll give you a hand with them later."

"I will be even happier when I get some clothes," Alleyne told him. "I have been helpless and dependent for too long. I am eager to get out and about. I need to find out who I am and reclaim my old life."

"If it is all the same to you, sir," Strickland was saying, "I'm going to shave you myself today. I'm getting used to seeing things one-eyed."

Alleyne looked at him dubiously.

"You really do have ambitions to be a valet, then, do you?" he asked.

"I've got to do something," the other man said, rubbing soap on the shaving brush. "I've only ever known soldiering. I took the king's shilling when I was little more than a nipper. It were either that or take to thieving and as like as not hang for it. I never did fancy thieving-or a hanging. I have to find something other than soldiering now, though. And why not valeting? I been taking orders from gentlemen and humoring their whims for six years since I made sergeant. I can dress you and shave you and look after your clothes with one eye the same as two."

"There is still the problem of my total poverty, though," Alleyne reminded him. But he let the sergeant soap his face and prepared to have his throat cut.

"I do have a bit of money, though, you see, sir," Strickland told him. "Not much to a gentleman's way of looking at things, I reckon, but enough to keep me going for a while. It's not so much money I need, sir, as a sense of belonging and being useful, at least for a little while till I get my feet under me."

"I know exactly how you feel," Alleyne said ruefully. "But you might do better than me, you know. We cannot even be sure that I am a gentleman, can we?"

"Oh, we certainly can be that," the sergeant assured him. "Never doubt it for a moment, sir. I have known men what are gentlemen and men what are not and men what pretend to be. You are one of the first kind and no doubt about it. I don't know who you are-you weren't in my regiment and I never set eyes on you till I saw you in the forest. But I know what you are."

Alleyne lay still as the razor scraped away stubble and the sergeant's face hovered over his own, bandaged and bruised and fierce as he frowned in concentration.

"Do you ever feel frightened, Strickland?" he asked.

"I reckon you are the one what should be feeling that," the sergeant said, grinning and revealing large, widely spaced teeth. "This is the first time I ever shaved another man. And I only got one eye to see out of so's I get it right."

"Frightened at losing your old way of life so abruptly, I mean," Alleyne explained, "and having to create a new one for yourself."

Sergeant Strickland straightened up, having completed one side of Alleyne's face.

"Frightened?" he said. "I never been frightened in my life, sir. Leastways I've never called it fright. It seems unmanly, don't it? Or maybe it's not the fright so much as what a fellow does with it. P'raps I do feel some fear, sir, but there's no point in letting it get a grip on, is there? There's a whole other world out there apart from the army. I'll go and find what there is. Maybe I'll like it better than what went before. Or maybe I won't. But if I don't, then I'll go looking for something else again. There's nothing to stop me, only my death, which will come when it comes whatever I do in the meanwhile."

He bent over Alleyne to tackle the other side of his face.

"In actual, honest fact," he continued, "it's not cowardly to be frightened. It's what I always said to my boys before a battle, especially the raw recruits fresh from England and their mothers' sides. If you was never frightened, sir, you would never find out what you was made of and what you was capable of doing. You would never become a better man than what you started out being. P'raps that is what you will discover-what you are made of and what you are capable of. And when you finally do remember who you are, p'raps you will find that you have become a better man than he ever was. P'raps he was a man who never ever grew any more once he reached manhood. P'raps he needed to do something drastic like losing his memory so that he could get his life unstuck. Begging your pardon for saying so, sir. Sometimes I talk too much."

"I perceive that you are a philosopher, Strickland," Alleyne said. "I wonder if I will have the strength of character to fulfill your expectations of me. Have you cut me yet?"

"That I have not," the sergeant said, straightening up again and examining his finished handiwork before wiping Alleyne's face with a clean towel. "I figure you lost enough blood for one month."

"Thank you," Alleyne said, running a hand over the smoothness of his jaw and thinking about the sergeant's words. He was, of course, desperately frightened, though it seemed shameful to admit it. It was surely one of the most dreadful of fates-to lose oneself, to have no memory of any of the twenty-five years or so of one's life. Did he have the courage and strength of character to build a new identity and a new life, perhaps better than the ones that went before them?

But even the sergeant was not quite as courageous as his words suggested. He was still at the brothel, even though he was mobile enough to have left anytime during the past several days. And he was willing to attach himself to a man who had not a penny with which to pay him-just so that he would not have to step out into the world alone just yet.

Stepping out into the world alone-it was a truly terrifying thought. Eager as he was to leave here, Alleyne realized suddenly, he was just as anxious to stay, to find some excuse to postpone the inevitable moment.

Sergeant Strickland was taking his time over washing out the brush and razor in the washbowl. He cleared his throat and spoke without looking at Alleyne.

"I like the ladies here, sir," he said. "I even manned the door for them last night so they would be free to entertain their gentlemen and feel safe if any of the gents decided to get rough. It don't matter to me what they do to earn their victuals. But I do wonder what Miss York is doing living here with them. She ain't one of them. Is she?"

Alleyne looked sharply at him.

"My understanding," he said, "is that she is a lady."

"I knew it, sir," the sergeant said. "From the first moment, when she was yelling out that you was her man and you was hurt bad, I knew she was a lady. But there is always the danger that her good name might be soiled on account of she is living in a brothel. We don't want to make it worse for her, if you get my drift, sir, do we? What do you want me to do with them hairpins on the table here? I wouldn't want the other ladies to see them there when they bring your breakfast, and get the wrong idea."

For a moment Alleyne felt like a private soldier cringing under the sergeant's gentle but unmistakable tongue lashing. Deuce take it, he had forgotten about the hairpins. He fervently wished that that had all been a dream. But there were the hairpins as incontrovertible proof that it had not been.

"Gather them up if you will, Strickland," he said, "and put them in the top drawer of the chest over there. She had a headache when she was sitting in here last evening keeping me company and removed the pins to reduce some of the tension."