Surrender to Sin

“Don’t worry,” Cary said. “I promise I won’t kiss you again. You have my word as a gentleman. Though I should like to point out that when I kissed you, you seemed to like it.”

“What?” she cried, exasperated. “I thought you were a bat.”

He glared at her fiercely. “You little beast! You did
not
think I was a bat.”

“I certainly did! Don’t you remember? I jumped out of the wardrobe—”

“Not that,” he said impatiently. “Less said about
that
the better. I mean, this morning, outside. When I met you by the bridge,” he pressed as she looked at him blankly.

“So you
did
kiss me!” Abigail exclaimed angrily. “I thought so!”

Cary’s eyebrows shot up. “You
thought
so? What the devil do you mean?” he demanded. “Was there any doubt?”

“Well—”

She scarcely got the word out. He swung her around, pushed her against the wall, and drove his mouth hard against hers. He kissed her expertly, then left her mouth briefly and kissed her neck, his hands skimming boldly down to her waist. As she tried to speak, he claimed her mouth again. It was just as well; she had no idea what she would have said.

Cary stopped kissing her eventually. “What do you think of that?” he asked breathlessly, holding her steady.

Abigail was equally breathless. And trembling. And confused. But at least the feeling of desperate panic was subsiding and she now had a very clear notion of the sort of man she ought to marry…

Without so much as a pageboy to assist her, Abigail Ritchie inched her way through the crowds of fashionable shoppers in Piccadilly, her packages stacked so high that only her chin kept them from tumbling out of her arms. Any casual observer who saw her slim figure buffeted this way and that by the pressures of the crowd might have mistaken her for a lady’s maid performing errands for her mistress. Indeed, the man who barreled into her, knocking her aside with his walking stick, had no way of knowing he had inconvenienced one of the richest young ladies in Britain. Had he been better informed, he might have been heartily sorry. As it was, he saw no reason to stop and offer either apologies or assistance to the solitary figure enveloped in a simple gray cloak. He simply pushed past her and continued on his way.

Abigail never saw him; her fur hood flopped forward into her eyes as she fell. Luckily, the Christmas presents tucked under her chin had not been dislodged in the collision, but she now had to regain her feet without the use of her hands. In the first attempt, she stumbled over her skirts as the heedless crowd surged past her. Her next attempt was forestalled by a pair of strong hands that picked her up and set her on her feet as if she had been a pawn on a chessboard.

“Ups-a-daisy!” said the owner of the hands. “On your feet, there’s a good girl.”

With her hood half-covering her eyes, Abigail could only see the lower half of her new acquaintance. He wore a long purple driving coat over buckskins and tall boots. In his gloved hands he carried a walking stick with a plain silver knob at the tip. A gentleman.

“Dulwich, as I live and breathe,” he muttered angrily.

Abigail shook her head until her hood fell backwards out of her eyes, then quickly planted her chin atop her packages again. “Was it
Lord Dulwich
who bumped into me?” she inquired.

“Bumped into you, child? Pretty charitable,” he said scornfully. “I’d have said he mowed you down like summer corn. I knew the man was a common drain, but I never thought him capable of knocking little girls down in the middle of a public street.”

He turned suddenly to smile at her, and Abigail caught her breath. She could only stare. He was, quite simply, the most beautiful man she had ever seen outside of a painting. With his dark hair, pointed beard, and the tiny gold ring he wore in one ear, he looked like a gypsy prince. His skin was unusually brown for an Englishman’s, which made his teeth look very white. She guessed his age at somewhere between twenty and thirty, but if he had claimed to be immortal, she would have believed him. He looked it.

“Beg pardon, ma’am!” he said gravely, though his gray eyes were laughing. “When viewed from the other side, you look precisely aged eleven and three quarters, or I should never have presumed to touch you. But I see from this side that you are quite grown up. Clearly, I ought to have pretended not to see you, like everyone else in this beastly mob.”

Abigail’s natural shyness rapidly transformed into terror. Handsome young men did not usually single her out for their gallantry. They certainly never teased her about her front or back sides. He made her so nervous that she almost wished he hadn’t stopped to help her at all. Beautiful gypsy princes, she quickly decided, were best enjoyed from a safe distance.

“So thoughtless of me,” he continued, evidently amused by her inability to speak. “As a gentleman, I ought to have made sure you were aged eleven and three quarters before I plucked you out of the dirt. Do please forgive my insufferable presumption. In future, I shall ask to see a baptismal certificate before I lend my assistance to any foundering thing in a petticoat.”

Abigail knew she ought to thank him, but her tongue was tied, and her mind had gone blank. Her face was more expressive, though; it turned bright red, invigorating her freckles.

She would have been quite surprised to learn that, despite an undeniable overactivity of freckles, the gentleman had not excluded her from the ranks of beauty. Without being smitten by her in the least, he liked what he saw: curly apricot-gold hair; big, light brown eyes; a wide, pink mouth under a straight, short nose. She looked to him like a good English girl, a credit to her parents, and someone who deserved better than a shove in the back, followed by a trampling.

“Thank you, sir.” Abigail finally forced the words out.

“That’s better; I thought you were going into shock.” With absolute false humility, he touched the brim of his hat. “Cary Wayborn, at your service, ma’am.”

Abigail gasped, her shyness broken by surprise. “Did you say
Wayborn
?” she cried impulsively. “Sir, my mother was a Wayborn!” As she spoke, one of her parcels began to inch forward, endangering the delicate balance of the entire stack.

“You seem to have developed a strange bulge in the middle,” he observed. “Since we are cousins, allow me to assist you.” With his walking stick, he pushed the box back into place.

“Thank you, sir,” she said breathlessly. “But are we really cousins, do you think?”

He studied her for a moment, seemingly oblivious to the bustling crowd surging past them. Abigail blushed again, knowing that he must be searching for some family resemblance. There was none, of course.
How could there be,
she thought hopelessly,
when he is like a painting by Caravaggio, and I’m an unsightly mass of freckles capped by frizzy hair?

“You must be one of my Derbyshire cousins,” he said, at the conclusion of his scrutiny.

His familiarity with her mother’s family coaxed Abigail further out of her shyness. “Lord Wayborn is my uncle, sir. Though, to own the truth, I’ve never met him. It is generally thought that my mother married to disoblige her family.”

Cary politely ignored this last, rather indiscreet revelation. “Then we are indeed cousins,” he said. “And where were you going just now, before that feculent lout knocked you down?”

Abigail gasped in dismay. “You mustn’t call his lordship insulting names, sir.”

He snorted. “My dear cousin, I was at school with the feculent lout. Believe me, I do not insult. I merely describe. Now, where were you going? I’ll carry your boxes.”

“My father is to collect me at Mr. Hatchard’s Bookshop, but there’s really no need—”

“What a charming coincidence. I was on my way to Hatchard’s myself,” he said, grinning. “Fortunately, I know a shortcut.”

Abigail was not sure she believed a word he said, but before she could reflect on the propriety of accepting so much assistance from a stranger, he had exchanged her packages for his stick and was steering her boldly through the crowd. She was now doubly bound to follow him; he was carrying the servants’ Christmas presents, and she had his walking stick.

“I don’t often have business at Hatchard’s,” Cary said easily, glancing at her now and then as she struggled to keep up with him, “but I’m told a book makes a nice Christmas present.”

He turned into an alley next to a tobacconist’s shop, and Abigail stopped in her tracks. She had never been off the main streets of London before, and this rather noisome, narrow alley hardly inspired confidence. She could see no end to its darkness, and she imagined it to be filled with unsavory characters and stray animals carrying a variety of incurable diseases.

“Sir,” she called to him nervously, “are you quite sure this is the way to Hatchard’s?”

He had stopped to shift her pile of boxes. “If you could just take this little one under my left arm,” he said, just as a small package popped out and hit the ground. “Not fragile, I hope?”

“It’s gloves,” said Abigail, stepping forward unthinkingly to pick it up. She was now standing in an alley for the first time in her life. To her relief, no desperate underworld character jumped out at her from the shadows. Indeed, the only people there besides herself and her “cousin” were a few honest deliverymen unloading a cart.

“I thought of getting her gloves,” Cary murmured. “But my sister has got gloves enough for a dozen Hindoo deities.”

To carry the little package more easily, Abigail slipped her finger through the twine binding it. “A book is a handsome gift, too,” she said, holding her skirts up out of the frozen mud and horse manure dotting the cobbles. As she stepped around the manure-making end of the carthorse, she nearly collided with a broad-shouldered man carrying a large sack.

“Beg pardon, miss,” he said gruffly, not looking at her as he tossed his burden onto a waiting pile. Clutching Cary’s stick, Abigail scurried around him.

“My sister is engaged to be married,” Cary went on, apparently not noticing her near mishap, “so I thought I’d get her one of those books you females can only read after marriage.” He slipped past a large white sheet hung on a clothesline, and disappeared from sight. Abigail edged around the sheet, careful not to touch it, only to find that her guide was nowhere in sight.

“This way, cousin.”

He had turned into another alley, this one so narrow they were forced to walk in single file. “What sort of books would you consider off limits to an unmarried woman?” she asked curiously. Somehow it was quite easy to talk to the back of his head.

“Oh, you know,” he responded carelessly, “
Tom Jones
,
Moll Flanders
, that sort of thing.”

“I’ve read them both, and I’m not married,” said Abigail, inching forward in the darkness.

“And which did you prefer, cousin? The rake or the trollop?”

Abigail gave what she hoped was a sophisticated answer. “On the whole I found that
Tom
lifted the spirits while
Moll
rather depressed them. And you, sir?”

“Oh, I never read questionable material myself,” he airily replied. “What would my cousin the Vicar say? I shall leave all such risky endeavors to Mrs. Wayborn. While I am out shooting pheasant for her supper, let her be tucked up in bed reading
Fanny Hill
for my…edification. So much more useful than embroidering my handkerchiefs, don’t you agree?”

“I’ve never thought about it,” said Abigail, wondering what Mrs. Wayborn would think if she knew her husband was in the habit of cutting through dark alleys with strange young women.

“Do you feel the wall growing hot?” he asked presently. “Shall we?”

Before Abigail could reply, he opened a door. A flickering crimson glow suddenly outlined his face. The hellish light, however, was accompanied by the comforting smell of freshly baked bread. Abigail entered the bakery first, a wall of heat slamming into her as she passed a row of huge brick ovens. The baker’s apprentices gaped at them, making Abigail blush, but Cary was the picture of unruffled calm as he helped himself to a hot cross bun. “Cousin?”

Abigail mutely shook her head.

Cary led her swiftly through the front of the shop where customers lined up at the glass-front cases. Mainly servants from well-heeled Mayfair households, they parted respectfully to let Cary and Abigail through. In a few seconds, the cousins were out on the street again, and Hatchard’s signboard was just ahead. Abigail felt as though she had been brought safely through a hostile foreign territory, but now was within sight of the British embassy. She drank in the cold, clean air and heard with pleasure the chatter of busy shoppers.

Her companion appeared unaffected by the adventure. Obviously, he was as comfortable in the back alleys of London as he would be in the court of St. James or a gypsy gathering. Abigail smiled at him shyly. “Thank you, sir. It was kind of you to help a complete stranger.”

“But we are not
complete
strangers, cousin,” he pointed out. “We are
relative
strangers. Would you be good enough to open the door for me? My hands are a bit full.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” she said quickly.

Abigail felt safe inside Hatchard’s Bookshop. The staff knew her there, and the senior clerk, Mr. Eldridge, came forward to greet her personally. Miss Ritchie was a voracious reader, and, better still, she always paid her bills, which was more than the gentleman with her could say. Mr. Eldridge frankly could not account for their having arrived together.

Cary gave Abigail’s packages to an attendant, and she returned his stick, then extended her hand to him in farewell. “Sir, allow me to thank you again—” she began, breaking off as he gravely removed the package still dangling by a string from her little finger. Abigail decided that his departure would be a relief to her. If she was so incapable of behaving like a sensible woman in his presence, then the sooner he was gone, the better. “Goodbye,” she said quickly.

As he bent over her gloved hand, she completed her disgrace by diving behind the sales counter, to the considerable surprise of the clerk. Cary was perhaps even more astonished by the maneuver. “What
are
you doing?” he demanded, leaning across the counter to look down at her.

Abigail frantically gestured for him to be silent. “Lord Dulwich,” she whispered, her eyes round with terror. “He’s here! Please, sir, don’t give me away!”

“Wayborn,” said the Viscount of Dulwich, tapping Cary on the shoulder. As Cary slowly turned around to face him, his lordship went on, “I thought we’d seen the last of your purple coats. Heard you were rusticating in Hertfordshire amongst the haystacks. On a pig farm, or some such thing. What’s the place called? Tatty-wood? Tinklewood?”

Cary leaned against the counter. “I’d tell you, but then you might visit me.”

His lordship sniffed, then turned to the clerk. “You there! I’m looking for some idiotic rubbish called
Kubla Khan
. The assistant is too stupid to help me, and I’m rather in a hurry.”

The clerk answered as smoothly as he could with Abigail crouched at his feet. “I regret to inform your lordship that Mr. Coleridge has not yet published his famous fragment. It will be out in the next few months, I believe.”

The Viscount was infuriated. “But I am Lord Dulwich, man. I want it now.”

“The man can’t pluck a book out of thin air,” Cary Wayborn pointed out reasonably.