The Duke (5 page)

Drawing the tapes of her cloak closer around her throat, she hurried on. When she neared the loud, seedy gin shop, she crossed the street and padded along in the shadows on the opposite side. Sober men were indecent enough.

At last, with a sigh of relief, she safely reached the laundress’s house and gave the woman the mended shirts. The laundress inspected her work with a nod of satisfaction, gave her several more to repair for the morrow, then paid her. Bel paused to hide the coins in the tiny leather purse at her waist inside her cloak. Drawing a deep breath, she pulled her hood back up, nodded good night to the laundress, and forced herself back out into the chilly darkness.

It was only a quarter hour’s walk to the hovel she now called home. The greasy yellowish fog seemed to have thickened, throwing noises behind her like heavy footfalls, making her own steps ring strangely off the brick houses in the narrow, twisting alleyways of the rookery. She glanced over her shoulder and walked faster.

A striped alley cat glided by. Shrill laughter spilled from a lit window above. She looked up in its direction, turned the corner and, in that split second, the man grabbed her.

Her terrified scream was muffled by a rough, callused hand.

She immediately began fighting, blindly thrashing against an iron grip as she was swept into a small side alley.

“Shut up.” The big man jerked her, then shoved her hard into the wall.

She barely caught herself in time from sprawling headlong. She looked up in wide-eyed terror to find the warden of the Fleet, clearly very drunk.

A sickening
knowing
promptly spiraled down to the pit of her stomach, paralyzing her. The carriage ride...

He had planned this.

“Hello, pretty,” he slurred, harshly pressing her up against the alley wall as though she were one of his unruly prisoners.

Struggling for calm, Bel swallowed hard. She was shaking uncontrollably. Her chest heaved with fright. She tried to back away, sliding along the wall. He stopped her, bracing his meaty hand on the bricks to block her path. With his other hand, he touched her hair. He smiled. She sobbed.

“Told you we’d compromise, didn’t I? Everything’s going to be just fine, lass. Long as you give me what I want.”

“No,” she uttered.

“Oh, aye,” he said hoarsely. He lowered his stinking mouth and tried to kiss her.

Wrenching her face away from him, she shrieked but he stifled the sound, clapping his hand over her mouth again. She fought against his brutal strength, her mind somehow refusing to accept that it was happening. Then his hand, hot and dirty, curled around her throat and he ground himself against her, his breath rasping at her ear. She grimaced in utter terror as tears welled in her eyes.

“Nice and easy now, girly, be still,” he grated in a voice like rusty iron. “Ye knew ye had it coming.” He pinned her hands above her head.

The details of the next few minutes she would never clearly recall.

The darkening world blurred and slowed and all she could hear was the pounding of her heart roaring in her ears. She sobbed and made herself stare up at the stars, tiny cold jabs of light like the heads of pins. Only the metallic clinking of the huge key ring he wore at his waist pierced her wild, black hysteria as he held her against cold cutting brick, tore her clothing, grabbed and hurt her. Then pain beyond horror, pain such as she had never known flashed before her stricken eyes, blinding her like lightning, sharp as a knife in her belly. The warden grunted and suddenly sagged against her, gasping, his grip slackening; she fought free with a scream trapped in her throat and ran.

“You tell anyone, and I’ll take it out of your pa’s hide!”
he shouted weakly after her.

Blind with crying, clothes torn, hair disheveled, she flung into a crowded thoroughfare with street lamps. She didn’t remember the Charley who found her and mistook her in a wild, incoherent state for a gin-drunk streetwalker, and apparently had escorted her to the magdalen house. She didn’t remember the women there who helped her. She only remembered sitting for nearly three days on a cot against a barren wall with her knees drawn up, thinking over and over again, That’s all I’m good for now.

Life as she had known it was over.

She—prim, respectable Miss Hamilton—knew better than anyone that there was a clear-cut line separating decency from disgrace.

Centuries had passed since she had been a refined country gentlewoman of Kelmscot, visiting with her neighbors, teaching Sunday school to the peasant children after services, attending the occasional Assembly ball. She was another sort of creature now, as lost and degraded as the prostitutes who came to this place seeking food and shelter from the cold, and mercury treatments for their horrid diseases.

She had nowhere to turn. Going to see Papa was out of the question. She couldn’t even inform against her attacker because, as keeper of a major
London
prison, the warden would doubtless have friends inside the justice offices at

On the third day one of the streetwalkers who had taken shelter there tried to talk to her while she lay curled up, staring at the wall. Bel didn’t recall much of the conversation until the brash, aging harlot had leaned toward her and offered in a shrewd tone: “If I ‘ad yer looks and yer fine lady airs, I’d take me to Harriette Wilson’s house and find me a rich lord protector, I would. Then I’d live in style!”

At that, Bel had looked up with her changed gaze.

She had heard that name before, spoken only in whispers. The divine Harriette Wilson was the greatest demirep in
London
.

She and her sisters were courtesans, Cyprians par excellence. They held infamous parties at their house on Saturday nights after the opera, which were said to be second only to White’s Club in the hearts of
London
’s richest and most powerful males. Rumor had it the Regent, the rebel poet Lord Byron, and even the great
Wellington
could be found in the company of these most sought-after diamonds of the Fashionable Impure.

Dolph moved in such circles. Why, she could become the mistress of his worst enemy, she thought as a faint, cold smile lit her face. How humiliated he would be, as she was now, how powerless and enraged, if he saw that she would rather become another man’s harlot instead of his wife. For this, ultimately, was Dolph’s fault.

Protector
. Delicious word.

Someone to help her, take all her fears away. Someone who was kind and would not harm her. The idea, wild, destructive, burned like a fever in her brain. And why not? She was already irrevocably ruined. Not even Mick Braden, wherever he was, would marry her in her state of shame.

The thought of her childhood sweetheart filled her with disgust. How he had failed her. She could admit it now— he was probably right here in
London
somewhere, dallying with a tavern wench, getting his leisurely fill of bachelorhood before sallying forth to Kelmscot, where he no doubt thought that she was still waiting patiently for him.

What a fool she was. If not for her fanciful hopes in him, she might have become another man’s wife and none of this need have happened, she thought bitterly. Harriette Wilson could teach her how to fend for herself.

Her simmering anger grew potent, acrid, dangerous.

She had too much pride to throw herself on the notorious Cyprian’s charity, but she could approach her as one businesswoman to another. If she promised Harriette Wilson a percentage of the proceeds from her future protector, she mused, the woman would surely agree to teach her the courtesan’s arts. What else did she have to lose?

Moments later Bel was gathering up her few possessions, her hands shaking slightly with the brashness of her decision. She knew she wasn’t thinking clearly but was too coldly, deeply enraged to care. She thanked the good people who had looked after her for the past three days and asked the streetwise jade where Harriette Wilson lived.

With her cloak wrapped tightly around her, she set out to find her fate on a day of mottled cloud and sun. It would be a long walk from the City to the clean, luxurious environs of Marylebone, north of
Mayfair
, where they were building roads and lavish terraces in the new Regent’s Park. Anger was balled up tightly within her, keeping her warm. She hadn’t eaten for a couple of days, but her physical hunger did not match her sharper one for revenge.

Protector
. Sweet word.

He didn’t have to be handsome. He didn’t have to be young, she thought as she strode swiftly through the streets, not looking back, her arms folded tightly around her. He didn’t have to shower her with finery and jewels.

He only had to be gentle and not make it too unpleasant for her, and he had to help her get Papa out of the Fleet and stand by when she faced that unspeakable brute.

If fate sent her such a person, she swore bitterly to the heavens, now that she was fallen, she would make it very worth his while.

“O
‘
Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such pros-per-ity
?
“O
‘
didn’t you know I’d been ruined?” said she.

—Thomas Hardy

Bait the hook well! This fish will bite.

—Shakespeare

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In the bracing sea breezes of Brighton Hawk found that he could breathe. Whether it was the distance from the crowds of
London
and all the places that reminded him of
her,
or the influence of the calm majestic sea, grief began to loosen its stranglehold over his heart.

The nights were relegated to his quest, but during the balmy April days he found solitude whenever he wished it, walking barefoot on the sand with his trousers rolled up around his calves. Far from the Promenade and the bathing machines, there was only the sough of the sea and the cries of the gulls. He felt himself healing, growing stronger.

Most mornings he liked to row straight out from the shore until
England
was hardly in sight. He fished. One day, warmed by the high spring sun, enticed by the placid, pale jade water, he took off his boots, pulled off his coat and waistcoat and dove off the side of his little dinghy.

The water was frigid and it stole his breath as he plummeted straight down through the tossing waves, shot like an arrow from a bow. The water was painfully cold, but it cleared his head to the point of an almost visionary lucidity. He swam deep, savoring the dull silence, the blue-green light below the surface. He thought of Lucy drowning in the pond and tried to imagine what that had been like.

Holding his breath until his lungs ached, he felt alone as always, yet free, floating, felt himself slowly coming untangled from her thrall, until at last he burst up to the surface, gasping, with no pearl in his clutches but the vague, strangely comforting notion that perhaps he had been more in love with his
idea
of Lucy than with the woman herself. It was both a virtue and a fault in him that he lived too much in his head, he knew.

Feeling more himself than he had in months, at length, he rowed back to shore with long, vigorous strokes, shivering in the brisk wind. He was staying at the Castle Inn on the west side of the Steine. Reaching his lodgings, he bathed, changed clothes, ate, then set out for the night’s usual party. His new chum, Dolph Breckinridge, would be attending a concert in the Regent’s garden, and so would Hawk.

Cultivating the baronet’s rakish set had been easier than he could have hoped, though it was still too soon to broach the subject of Lucy without raising suspicions. Among the wastrels he had to put up with a good deal of ribbing about his superior morals, but they accepted his casual association as an enhancement to their own reputations. He bided his time, sensing that his goal was ever nearer.

The parties the Regent threw at
Brighton
were so vast that Hawk felt almost anonymous, strolling idly from room to room and out onto the greensward where the German orchestra was playing. To his satisfaction, he happened across Dolph standing alone at the corner of the terrace, staring out to sea in a pensive mood.

Maybe after ten days of cultivating the baronet, tonight at last he might unearth the key he sought. Hawk sauntered over to him at the balustrade, disguising seething hostility behind his impeccable facade of cordial reserve. “Breckinridge.”

“Hawkscliffe,” Dolph slurred, then sighed heavily and took a swig from his bottle.

Drunk, thought Hawk.
Perfect.
“Something wrong, old boy?”

Dolph sent him a sideward glance, his heavy-lidded eyes looking duller than usual. “Have you ever been in love, Hawkscliffe?”