Star Crossed Seduction (2 page)

At her destination, a couple of dubious-looking urchins were feeding broken barrel staves into a bonfire. Its flickering light revealed the high cheekbones, pert nose, and surprisingly even white teeth that confirmed what Trev had suspected. The woman in black was a beauty. She stopped to exchange words with a tiny girl who’d been warming her hands by its flames, then moved away into the crowd.

When she had passed out of sight, he noticed for the first time what had drawn it. An older man stood on a crude box amid the throng. His face was craggy, he was missing teeth, and his hair was long and unkempt. Though it wasn’t his appearance that had attracted the crush of onlookers but his harsh, piercing voice.

He was a ballad singer, one of the many who plied their trade on the city streets, though it would have been closer to the truth to call the man a ballad shouter, for like the rest of his kind, he bawled out the crude, rhyming lyrics that brought the latest news to people like these, too poor to afford newspapers or too unlettered to read them.

Trev wondered what the man could be shouting about to have attracted so many people. But he hadn’t put off his visit to Mother Bristwick’s to learn what the poor considered news. Though the woman whose small act of kindness had done so much to lighten his mood had melted into the crowd, he could still see her red feather waving above it. So he pushed his way through the assembled workmen, hoping to close the distance between them, and as he did, got close enough to the ballad singer to hear his words.

To his relief, they weren’t about the latest scandal on everyone’s tongue, the king’s failure to get Parliament to convict his wife of treason and keep her from being crowned. If they had been, he’d have had no choice but to leave. His regiment, the King’s Royal Irish Light Dragoons, was famed for its loyalty to the crown. But, to his relief, the man’s verses were about a battle—a glorious battle.

The stock phrases he bellowed praised the courageous English and damned their cowardly foes, bringing alive the clash of swords and the roar of the cannon—battle as it had always been presented to folk at home. But it was hard to tell which battle the man was romancing. He might have been describing any from the Crécy to Waterloo. The English were brave, the foe craven. And no ballad told of the screams of the dying or the stench of intestines slashed through and exposed to the sun.

“It appears you’re being honored,” Major Stanley said.

“Me?”

“Didn’t you hear him mention the Pindaris? He’s singing up your battle, Trev. Puff out your chest, man. You’re the hero of the day.”

Trev’s ears perked up. It was, indeed, his battle the man was offering up as entertainment to his audience with his garbled account of Baji Rao’s treachery and the rout of the Pindaris, though in the ballad singer’s version, those brave Maratha warriors were reduced to brigands no different from the highwaymen who infested Hounslow Heath.

The singer dwelled with relish on the numbers who had died on either side, and the crowd roared their approval upon hearing how the eight hundred Europeans and their native allies had held off eighteen thousand enemy horse with only eighty-six men killed or wounded on the English side.

It was glorious indeed. So very glorious. But as the man’s chanted flow of stanzas drew toward the end of the story, Trev braced himself, knowing as the crowd did not, what had come next: the rest of the deaths, the ones that had not been added into that paltry eighty-six: the deaths of the wives of their native allies, the sepoys, the innocent women who’d been raped and murdered by a troop of enemy raiders just as the armies had massed for the final battle.

He fought down the memory of the bloodied saris, the babies’ brains spattered against the rocks. It had been a necessary sacrifice. Had they ordered the women’s camp to be moved somewhere safer, it would have given away their battle plan. But still, his stomach clenched, and he tasted a sour taste that was not entirely due to the major’s cheap wine.

Sensing his thoughts, the major tugged on his arm and tried to draw him from the crowd. He knew the whole story. Trev had told him the gist of it, late one night on shipboard when, unable to sleep, he’d sat up on deck the whole night, watching the Southern Cross wheel across the sky.

But Trev wasn’t going to let the ballad singer’s chant drive him away. He would not give in to weakness. The thing had happened, and he could do nothing about it now. He’d be worthless as a commander if he let a memory unman him. War was glorious only in verses of the Fleet Street hacks whose words this ballad singer chanted. Every soldier knew that the reality was different, and that the bravest thing many a soldier would do was to keep on living after the battle was over, knowing his victory’s true cost.

As he must.

He gritted his teeth and shut his eyes for a moment, forcing his mind to concentrate on the workmen who were pressed up against him, making himself inhale their stench, and hoping the reek of onions and unwashed bodies would drag him back to the present. When at length he opened his eyes, he startled.

A woman was staring at him. The woman in black.

Her eyes, which had sparkled so when she’d brought the crossing boy his dinner, were hard now, and glowed with what looked like contempt. The kindness he’d seen in them was gone. Her reproachful glare was the look he saw in the eyes of the sepoys’ women when they came back to him in dreams to rail at him for his failure to protect them.

Her gaze pierced through him, relentless and unforgiving. She had caught him in a moment of naked suffering, judged him, and condemned him.

As he tore his eyes away from hers, she vanished. Her disappearance left him bereft.

Why should it matter? She was no one. A stranger he’d never see again. It had only been a whim that set him chasing after her. But, even so, he couldn’t stop himself from scanning the crowd, searching for her jaunty bobbing feather.

He grabbed the major’s arm. “Let’s go.”

They’d dawdled long enough chasing after some will-of-the-wisp—a stranger, dressed in black, glimpsed for just a moment on a foggy evening, who had, for that one instant, seemed like a beacon in the gloom. He’d let his fancy run away with him. Whatever she’d done for the crossing boy, she had nothing for him. If he were to find her again, it might only be to see her pressed up against the wall servicing some wretch for a couple of pennies. Up close, she might smell like the men who surrounded him. She might turn out to be pocked and gap-toothed, barely intelligible, speaking the harsh cant of the streets.

It was time to go on to Mother Bristwick’s. Her girls might look at him with hard eyes, but they’d do what they were paid to do—which obviously he needed. Lust did funny things to a man’s mind. When it was taken care of, perhaps he wouldn’t be so morbid.

B
ut as Trev turned to make his way out of the crowd, the tiny girl he’d seen standing by the fire approached him. She held a sheaf of papers under one arm and was waving a printed broadside, which featured a crude woodcut of horses in battle and the verses the ballad singer had just sung, with her other.

“How much?” he asked.

“Only two pennies.”

He reached into his pocket. The broadsheet would entertain his mother, whose idea of military glory was not far from that of the ballad singer. The girl handed him the broadside and faded back into the crowd.

As he watched her go, someone jostled against his side. With instincts honed in the bazaar he whipped around, one hand flying to his pocket. He knew what that jostling meant: It was the oldest trick in the book—the bump and grab—practiced by teams of pickpockets from Land’s End to Calcutta. One would do something to get the victim to show where he kept his money, then the other would take advantage of his inattention to rob him.

But as he spun around to foil the scheme, he stopped, paralyzed, when he spotted his assailant: It was the woman in black.

When she realized he’d seen her, she froze with one hand thrust deep into an opening of her long black skirt. Then she hid her face in her shawl, whipped around, and flung herself into the crowd.

“Stop, thief!” howled the man standing beside Trev, launching himself after her. Others took up his cry.

Trev’s reached a hand into his pocket. His coins were gone, every last one of them. It hit him in the gut. Why did it have to be her?

But why should he care? He’d figured her for a whore. Why be surprised when she’d turned out to be a pickpocket instead? In the harsh hierarchy of the street, her calling might be a step up.

With studied casualness, he checked his other pockets, careful to avoid tipping off other criminals in the crowd as to where he kept his valuables. Fortunately, the pickpocket’s prying fingers hadn’t found anything else. But though his loss was trivial, her success made him uneasy. A man who followed his calling couldn’t afford to drop his guard. He wouldn’t last long without it.

If the woman in black had thought to find safety by hiding within the crowd, she’d been mistaken, for the men making up its outer circle had drawn together and linked their brawny arms to create a barrier. She’d not get out again. Not with the size of those brutes.

Trev stood on his toes to add a few more inches to the height that already gave him the advantage over the men who pressed in all around him, but he couldn’t find her. Then a cry rose from the other side of the crowd, which parted to reveal a thick man wearing the leather apron of a shoemaker. He had the girl by the wrists and was dragging her toward Trev.

“Steal from honest people, will you, missy?” he shouted. “Not while I’m about. Off to Newgate you’ll be, but not before I get my reward.”

The long feather swayed as she fought to escape the shoemaker’s grasp, then his meaty fist knocked off her hat. It fell onto the filthy cobbles, revealing curls the color of tarnished bronze. Even in the gloom, their beauty made Trev draw in breath.

“I ain’t done nothing,” she protested.

“Nothing but steal from honest folk as works hard for their money.”

“You can’t prove it!”

“Ah, but I can.” The man reached deep into the pocket in her black skirt, drawing forth a handful of something that glittered, but after he brought his fist up to his face to examine his takings, a look of disgust replaced his earlier look of triumph. His hand held only a few shillings worth of change.

“It’s mine, and you can’t prove otherwise,” she insisted.

“Canny little bitch, she is,” a man beside the shoemaker called out. “You’ll get no blood money for her. Too fly to steal a ticker or something else that could get her lagged.”

“That’s but one pocket,” the shoemaker said. “The drab may have a dozen more pockets hidden in her gown. I’ll find a watch on her, don’t you fear, and when I do, I’ll take her to the magistrate and claim me reward.”

The girl twisted in the man’s grasp and clawed at him as she tried to break free. Her ferocity did not argue well for her innocence. But as her eyes locked onto Trev’s, again, they stopped him in his tracks. He’d seen a look like that only once before, in battle, in the eyes of a man who’d exchanged blow after blow with him in a struggle that would only end with a death.

She wouldn’t give in, though she knew she could not prevail. She was magnificent, a woman warrior as bold as Boadicea. He’d never seen a woman show such courage. He hadn’t known one could.

But her courage wasn’t enough, for the shoemaker easily subdued her and bound her wrists.

Major Stanley tugged at his sleeve. “Come on. It’s getting nasty. We had best be off.”

“I can’t leave her to this mob. They’ll tear her apart.”

“She’s a pickpocket, Trev. She’s only getting her due.”

“Perhaps, but I can’t leave her to these brutes.” Even as the words left his mouth, he wondered why he’d said them. He was a soldier sworn to protect the state and uphold the laws. He should abandon her to her well-deserved fate. But he couldn’t. Her simple act of kindness had stood out so starkly against the apathy all around her, and her eyes had, for that one agonizing moment, brought back to life the ghosts of the sepoys’ women. They, too, had been brave, but no one had come to rescue them.

Still, he’d be a fool to intervene. She was, after all, a criminal. But when the shoemaker jerked on the cord with which he’d bound her wrists and gave her a hard slap across the face, Trev grasped the hilt of his saber, which was sharp enough to slice through a man’s wrist, and charged through the crowd toward her captor.

“Give her to me,” he commanded in the tone that had reduced more than one subaltern to tears on the parade ground. “She stole from me. I’ll punish her.”

A muttered oath beside him told him that, despite his wariness, Major Stanley had followed him into the crowd and stood now by his side. Trev’s confidence swelled in response to his friend’s show of loyalty.

The shoemaker puffed himself up—he was a large man obviously accustomed to having his way. But Trev was taller and fitter, and the major was no weakling, either. When Stanley reached for his own saber, some of the shoemaker’s bluster abated. Trev could almost hear the man calculating his chances in a fight and rating them poorly. Still, he must not count on the man’s behaving rationally. Some bullies just liked to fight, and if the shoemaker could get the crowd behind him, there still might be trouble. Best to use diplomacy rather than force to defuse the situation. That was always the best approach.