To Tempt a Saint (21 page)
Authors: Kate Moore
Xander understood. He took her by the shoulders, sure he could offer a bit of comfort without losing control. “The letters are from my mother in Paris. This is her house. The Bills of Mortality tell me about the health of London. I suspect your uncle has a different motive for reading them.”
“We always come back to him, don’t we? Tonight at the police office, I thought somehow you were . . .”
Xander swore, his intentions no match for the look in those eyes, and pulled her hard against him, his warm, bedraggled wife. She was insubstantial in his arms, pluck and kindness and sauce. She had no idea of the danger of provoking him. He could crush her if he wanted. He could kiss her until she melted and yielded and lost herself to him, until there was no escape for her. The puzzle of it was how someone so slight could stir a hunger in him that threatened his rational plan, his desperate search, and even his grand ambitions.
He brought her face up to his. Tonight he wanted her, just her, just this moment. When he kissed her, the heat of it made of his resistance a burning vapor. She arched up to his kiss, the pair of them lurching down the path of sensual surrender until he lifted his head, trying to judge the distance to the bed, and saw instead the open drawer of letters, pleading, accusing, demanding he stay the course and take nothing for himself until he found his brother.
He groaned and pressed her close against his beating heart, holding her by the back of her burnished curls, letting the raging need cool in his veins. She was everything he taught himself not to be—reckless and demanding and headlong—and, he laughed at himself, everything he wanted. But that was not the plan.
“Let’s get you to your bed.” He led the way.
At the door to her room, she looked up at him again, a puzzled frown on her brow. “I have no more magic dresses to wear.”
He laughed.
As if those dresses mattered.
“I don’t dream of you in clothes.”
As if those dresses mattered.
“I don’t dream of you in clothes.”
Chapter Fifteen
C
LEO’S next three at-home days produced no callers. Their appearance in the box at the Opera House had insured that. No doubt Millie Trentham was spreading her version of Cleo’s marriage around the gilt-edged drawing rooms of Mayfair. Each morning Cleo watched Cook’s tray of tea and cakes for as long as she could, trying not to think about perfumed letters in a drawer and broken embraces and her husband’s last words to her. He dreamed of her. Naked.
LEO’S next three at-home days produced no callers. Their appearance in the box at the Opera House had insured that. No doubt Millie Trentham was spreading her version of Cleo’s marriage around the gilt-edged drawing rooms of Mayfair. Each morning Cleo watched Cook’s tray of tea and cakes for as long as she could, trying not to think about perfumed letters in a drawer and broken embraces and her husband’s last words to her. He dreamed of her. Naked.
But he did not seek her out. He had some other dream, too, something consuming, against which her knife and her person were no match. She did not think it was gaslights. She was absurd, wanting their next bank appointment so that she could take his arm and hear his voice.
She took the tray of cakes and tea and headed for the kitchen. She had taken to making bundles of them for the boy who came to spy. He was, after all, her only caller. He might be her uncle’s tool, but he was alone in the cold.
Coming back to the kitchen from the garden, she stopped, hearing the voice of her husband in conversation with her brother. She and her husband had not talked since the night of the theater, and she settled on the kitchen step just to hear the low rumble of his voice.
“Hodge says I’m ready for the entrance tests anytime. Next week even,” Charlie declared.
“You’re not getting cold feet, are you?”
“No. Hodge says they’ll take me at your old school. He says they liked all the Jones boys there.” She could hear the shyness in her brother’s voice. She had a hard time imagining teachers that found Will Jones a likable student, but maybe as a boy he’d had some good qualities.
“And Amos says—”
“You’ve got Amos speaking, have you?”
“Not volumes.” She could almost see the grin on Charlie’s face. “But sentences, sometimes. Amos says, ‘Master Will was the difficult one of the lot.’ ”
The lot
. Cleo thought it overstated their numbers, but maybe to Amos, two such boys as they must have been in one household would seem a lot. There was a slight pause before her husband answered Charlie.
. Cleo thought it overstated their numbers, but maybe to Amos, two such boys as they must have been in one household would seem a lot. There was a slight pause before her husband answered Charlie.
“That’s Amos, always exaggerating.”
Charlie laughed. “So, are you going to tell me how things are going at the gasworks?”
“I promised, didn’t I?”
Cleo stiffened. Her brother and her husband had a secret friendship, which neither had bothered to share with her. She felt suddenly adrift. She heard Xander rise, move about the kitchen, and return to the table.
“You can make light from it?” Charlie asked.
She pulled herself back to attention, trying to make sense of the turn the conversation had taken.
Xander’s voice again. “Seems against nature, doesn’t it? To take a lump of darkness that’s lain in the deepest earth for centuries, heat it hotter than hell, and turn it into a thing of airy lightness that burns like six candles with a constant flame.”
Oh, coal.
“How does it work?”
“Men shovel coal into dozens of iron cylinders, called retorts, and heat it until the coal breaks into gas and tar and coke. There’s a use for every bit of it, but our main interest is the gas. We draw if off, cool it, purify it, and store it in great holders.”
Charlie asked another question and another until Xander Jones laughed, an easy, relaxed sound Cleo had rarely heard. He went on explaining about the heat and noise and smoldering chimneys of the gasworks and how they would pump the gas through miles of pipe until the streets of London made a vast network of light.
“So you have to dig up all the streets then? Won’t people complain?”
“Loudly. But it must be done to light cities all over the world.”
“In Africa? In India?” Charlie’s voice was full of the wonder of it all.
“Yes, but London, first, which takes charters, and acts of Parliament, and money.”
“Cleo’s money.” Charlie’s voice was sober again. “That’s why you married her, isn’t it?”
Cleo found herself clutching the ends of her shawl in her fists, waiting for an answer she already knew. She could count on her husband to be honest.
Instead there was the scrape of chair being pushed back. “Would you rather your uncle had that money?”
“No, sir, but maybe you could use my money.”
“Thank you, Charlie. I think you should save your money for the next invention. Maybe you’ll figure out how to use lightning itself or catch sunlight in a box and make a second fortune.”
Cleo prepared to be discovered as she heard them move, but instead her husband and brother went up the stairs into the house. She had no trouble sneaking past Cook a few minutes later.
Later Charlie found her in her room, staring at the fire. He brought a plate of new-baked cakes from Cook. “Cook thinks you eat all the tea cakes yourself, but you don’t, do you?”
Cleo shook her head. “How did you guess?”
“You look low, Cleo.”
“Not at all. Not with you doing so well. I’ve things on my mind is all.” She put the plate of cakes on the table between them.
Charlie looked stricken. “Maybe we were better off on the farm.”
“I thought you were happy here?”
“I am, but we were happy before, weren’t we? When we were just us?” He dropped into the chair opposite Cleo.
“It couldn’t last. Uncle March would have taken you from me.”
“But maybe now we could go back. I don’t have to go to school.”
“Of course you do. That’s why I . . .”
Charlie chose a little yellow-frosted cake from the plate and held it in his hands. He had gained weight in just the short time they had been in town. “I know, Cleo. You made this marriage for me, so I could go to school, but if you’re not happy, how can I be happy at school? I mean how can a fellow enjoy his happiness when someone he . . . loves . . .”—he broke the little cake in half and in half again—“is unhappy?”
Looking at Charlie’s woeful face, Cleo wanted to hug him, but the thought of her husband’s advice stopped her. “It’s a problem, I agree. But denying ourselves cake won’t feed our friends. Maybe the best we can do is to share the happiness we have with those around us. Maybe when you enjoy your happiness, you contribute to mine.”
“I do like living here, Cleo. The bed’s too small, but the food’s good. Really good,” he said. He popped the broken cake into his mouth.
In the end Charlie suggested a walk in the park to cheer her. The cold was bracing, punishing, good for driving low spirits away. She and Xander had no evening plans, which meant she did not know when she would see him again. She didn’t think of leaving the park until she caught Charlie shivering.
“Oh dear, why didn’t you say something?”
“Couldn’t. My teeth would rattle.”
They crossed the heavy traffic of Park Lane as lamp-lighters went from post to post, igniting a feeble glow against a coffee-colored pall of mist. People rushed to finish errands in the fading light. Maybe it was the earnest traffic in the lane at dusk that made Cleo feel so lonely. She was back in London, back on a dear and familiar street, but no one had called. London was merely dark brick and uneven stone, chilling air and choking soot. The noise of vendors and vehicles filled her ears, but no one spoke to her or to Charlie. London no longer knew her.
A donkey cart, its load covered by rough sacks, edged along the sidewalk beside them. The donkey plodded along no faster than Cleo and Charlie. Coming toward them, a boy with a dark blue cap pulled low over his ears cried, “Who’ll buy? Get yer penny’s worth.” He shook a pan of hot chestnuts at them.
Cleo stopped. “Let’s get some to warm you on the way home,” she suggested to Charlie.
The chestnut boy grinned, stepping up in front of them. He had to be colder than Charlie, his rough jacket patched and open and a long red scarf wound round his neck. “Penny’s worth, miss?”
Cleo stepped back to the pavement’s edge to keep away from the hot chestnut pan. As she reached for her reticule, the wheels of the donkey cart brushed her skirt.
The next instant a foul sack covered her head and thick arms circled her, pinning her arms to her side. She shouted, and her throat filled with chaff and dust that set her coughing. She felt herself lifted off her feet and kicked out at her unseen attacker.
Charlie shouted her name, and her attacker lurched and swayed. Abruptly he let her go. Her back smacked against the cart, her breath left her in a whoosh, and her feet hit the pavement. She tumbled sideways, her shoulder slamming the stones with a jolt. Desperate for breath, she writhed and squirmed in the foul sack. She fought her way out of the rough cloth and pressed her fists to her aching chest, trying to gasp the cold night air.
She was covered in bits of chaff, and pinpoints of light danced before her eyes. In the circle of dancing pricks, she could see Charlie fastened to the back of a large man who staggered in a strange dance, clawing at Charlie and trying to butt Charlie’s head with his own. The man swung violently around to smash Charlie against a lamppost.
“Run, Cleo,” Charlie yelled.
They seemed invisible, cut off by the fog from any notice of passersby. The donkey brayed displeasure as the cart blocked them from the traffic.
Cleo pushed herself up on her knees, trapped in an airless place, swaying dizzily. She reached for the knife in her hem, but her fist would not close around it.
The big man scraped Charlie off his back against a lamppost and smashed him to the ground. He lifted an enormous foot as Charlie raised his head. Cleo tried to find the breath to yell.
Out of the dark came Xander Jones. He launched himself at the big man with a shoulder to the man’s gut that sent him reeling against the cart. The brute’s bellow died as Xander’s fist smashed his mouth. The giant toppled back into the cart, his legs flying up. Xander reached to grab the man’s shirt, but the cart driver cracked his whip, and the cart rumbled away.
They stood in the gloom, harsh breaths steaming in the cold air. Cleo simply looked at Xander Jones. He looked back at her. Anger vibrated off him, but something else that she knew was in her, too. She needed to touch him. She dropped her gaze from his. As if she had spoken the need, he answered, pulling her up into a fierce hold.
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