Untamed (3 page)

Rourke let the curtain drop and turned back inside. “You’re taking me to Number Ten Downing Street!
That
house!” Patrick O’Rourke to hobnob with the inhabitants of the ministerial residence, who would have thunk it!

The corners of the older man’s mouth twitched in what might have been the beginnings of a smile. “Quite. Once there, my good wife shall see that you receive a wholesome meal, a hot bath, and dressings for those wounds. The future will look a good deal brighter after a night’s rest in a bed all of your own.”

Yawning, Rourke wasn’t so certain about the bath part, but the bit about supper and a bed sounded grand. After a year of living off maggoty meat and bunking on a musty mattress with three other boys, Gladstone’s description of the hospitality to come seemed like heaven on earth. Truth be told, he was more than ready to fall asleep where he was. Outside, the air was sharp as a knife, but cradled within the gently rocking carriage, he felt snug as a bug in a rug. Suddenly it seemed an effort to hold open even one of his eyes. He snuggled against the leather squab and considered that for the future, he might want to alter his rule of no looking back.

Looking back might not always be such a bad thing after all.

Some thirty-odd leagues from London, on an estate set upon the wide, flat plains of the Romney Marsh, a little girl of a like age but markedly different birth was having her own trial of a day.

Straw and stable mud sticking to her riding boots, eleven-year-old Katherine—Kate—raced into her family’s breakfast room, skidding to a stop at the foot of the linen-covered breakfast table. “Papa, Papa, someone’s stolen Princess. She’s not in her stall. She’s not anywhere in the stable or in the paddock, either.”

Arthur Lindsey, third Earl of Romney, lifted red-rimmed eyes from the raw egg he’d just dropped into his glass of beer and scowled. “Katherine, do cease caterwauling. It’s scarcely ten o’clock.”

Kate halted at the table’s foot. Loud sounds at any time of day always made Papa cross, but particularly so in the mornings. Displays of “vulgar emotion” did not set well with him, either. Chest heaving, she tried calming herself as best she might, given the monumental nature of the current calamity.

Princess was very precious to Kate. The mare had been a birthday gift, the last birthday her mummy would live to help her celebrate. Since Mummy had gone to live with the angels the summer before, the horse had been Kate’s closest confidante, best friend, and principal playmate. She loved her little sister, Bea, certainly, but you couldn’t really play with a toddler. Nor had she ever understood why so many other little girls fancied dolls. She’d found dressing and undressing them to be a bore, but then she scarcely cared for clothes herself. As for stuffed animals, why bother cuddling a cloth-covered bear or satin-sewn pup when there were so many real live animals to love who could love you back?

Be the weather fair or foul, every morning Kate sprang out of bed, pulled on her riding boots, and rushed out to the stable where she headed straight for Princess’s stall. Kate couldn’t imagine a lovelier start to the day—or a worse beginning to this one.

“I’m sorry, Papa, but Princess’s gone missing. She’s not in the stable or the paddock, either. Someone must have stolen her in the night. We have to do something, call in the magistrate, organize a search party, post a reward …
something
before the thieves get any farther away.”

“Calm yourself, Katherine. The horse isn’t stolen. It has been sold.”

Sold!
The unfathomable horror of that single word sent Kate staggering. “S-sold?” Her stomach couldn’t have hurt any worse if he’d stood from the table and struck her.

Her father nodded, and then winced as if the minor movement must cause him pain. “I’m sorry, Katherine, but there was no help for it. I got into a … spot of trouble the other night, and family honor called for putting Princess up as collateral.”

Family honor? “You wagered my horse in a card game?”

His gaze shuttered. “It is not the place of children to question their parents.” A curtain of frost closed over his face. “I know you’re fond of the beast, but a pony is property to be purchased and sold, not unlike this table upon which our breakfast is laid out or the chair upon which I sit.”

Princess wasn’t property, not to Kate’s way of thinking. Property was an object, unthinking and unfeeling, whereas a horse was flesh and blood. And Princess was so smart. She’d learned all sorts of clever tricks over the past year. But she didn’t only think. She felt things, too. Whenever Princess caught sight and scent of her mistress, she nickered and came trotting over, rubbing her head against Kate and sometimes even trying to groom her. Imagining how frightened and bewildered her friend must be feeling now, Kate caught her reflection in the pier glass in time to see a tear squeeze out of her eye and slide down her cheek.

Even knowing she was fighting a losing battle—grown-ups always had the upper hand no matter how canny and capable a child might be—Kate’s sense of justice compelled her to go on. “If that’s true, then she’s my property, not yours. You and Mummy gave her to me. Taking back a gift is wrong.”

“That will be quite enough.” Papa’s red-rimmed eyes hardened, and his mouth thinned. “You would have outgrown her in another year or two. Once our … finances are more robust, we shall go to London and take a drive to Tattersall’s in Knightsbridge Green. You may select any mare you fancy.” Apparently considering the matter settled, he raised his breakfast pint, tipped it back, and downed the ovum in a single swallow.

“But I don’t want any horse. I want Princess.”

Gagging, he set the glass aside. “You are being deliberately obstinate. A horse is a horse is a horse.”

Not to me, Papa.

Proud though Kate was, for Princess’s sake she was prepared to plead. She edged toward his chair and caught at his sleeve. “Buy her back, Papa, please do. If you do, I’ll be the best, most obedient daughter in the whole world, I promise.”

He shrugged her off and reached for the napkin to blot his mouth. “I’m afraid it’s too late.”

Too late meant Princess was, indeed, gone. The hollow feeling in Kate’s stomach matched that in her heart. There was nothing left for her to lose. She stared up at her father, his elbows planted on the table and head held between his slender white hands, and felt hatred curl like a garter snake in the pit of her belly.

“I hate you! I hate you! I
hate
you. I wish you were the one dead and not Mummy.” If he was, Kate felt certain it wouldn’t be the angels he lived among.

Upset as she was, it wasn’t temper that compelled her to tell her father she hated him. It was the truth. Her mother wouldn’t stay out all night getting into “spots of trouble,” and then come home afterward reeking of cigar smoke and perfume and another bad smell that belonged to a grown-up drink called brandy.

He slammed a fist atop the table, sending the empty place setting rattling. “Katherine, these tantrums will not be tolerated. Such public displays of spleen are not only unladylike, they are common. Go to your room and do not dare come out until I say you may—
now!”

Kate turned and ran from the breakfast room, into the front hall, and up the stairs. Halfway up, she tripped, coming down hard on her knees. The bruising pain felt right somehow, solid. She pulled herself up by her hands and scrambled to the top, nearly plowing into the sweet-faced, blond chambermaid, Hattie, polishing the landing rail.

“Miss Kathy, you gave me a fright. Are you all right?”

Normally Kate would have stopped for a chat—they were friends, after all—but today she pushed past. She didn’t stop running until she reached her bedroom at the back of the house. She entered, slamming the door behind her. A shriek drew her attention out the window, curtains fluttering in the spring breeze. Her window looked out onto the stable, paddock and pasture beyond, the main reason she’d years ago chosen this room as hers. She hurried over and yanked the chintz aside.

Her heart lurched. A groomsman wearing dark green livery trimmed with yellow piping emerged from the pasture, pulling Princess in tow. Even from a distance, Kate saw the pony’s posture had a forlorn air, ears flattened toward the back and tail tucked. She dug her nails into her palms, helpless to do more than watch as the man walked Princess down the drive leading to the main road. Several times the horse dug in her heels and turned her head back, but the groom jerked on her bridle, forcing her forward. A stranger looking on might have dismissed the horse’s behavior as obstinacy, but Kate knew full well what it signified.

Her friend was searching for her to say good-bye.

Kate hadn’t cried since the day Bea was born. Her mummy had laid the squalling bundle in her arms and made her promise to be both mother and sister. Now she balled her hands into fists and scrunched them against her eyes, thinking to stop the tears from flowing like the little boy in the fairy tale who’d plugged the hole in the dyke with his thumb. It was no use. Water spurted from her eyes and slid down her cheeks and neck, the salted droplets dissolving into her collar. Her throat felt raw, and her chest burned as though she held her breath underwater and was coming to the end of her endurance.

Only Kate wasn’t coming to the end, not nearly. She might be drowning in sorrow and thrashing in fury, but she was only at the beginning. Sobbing, she fisted a hand into her hair and tugged hard, fighting the urge to turn her futile anger inward and rip out great golden brown chunks.

I’ll never forget you, Princess, and I’ll never stop loving you. Not now, not ever. And I’ll never forgive you, Papa, or forget. Not now. Not ever.

Some time later, calm descended. She scrubbed her fists across her eyes and turned away from the window, her decision made. Never again would she open herself to such heavy heartache, such wrenching loss. Whether Papa won at cards or lost no longer mattered. She wouldn’t be accompanying him to Tattersall’s no matter how “flush” he might be. She was done with horses, done with losing precious things she loved, done with loving period. The cost was too dear, the result too painful to bear repeating.

The lesson, bitterly learned, would follow Kate into the ensuing years.

When you loved someone, they always,
always
went away.

Covent Garden Opera House
February 1890

ourke squinted out into the ballroom where guests were penned in like so many Shetland sheep. “You swore she’d be here.”

Stepping back amongst his friends, Harry and Gavin, he yanked at his collar, the starched points of which had been stabbing into either side of his jaw for the past hour. If seen, the gesture would betray his commonness, but it couldn’t be helped. It was hot. Hot as hell, or best make that hot as
Hades
as his newly fashionable former Roxbury House friends, Gavin and Harry, had schooled him to say. The enormous crystal chandelier suspended overhead wasn’t solely to blame. Heat from incandescent burners spilled out from the tiered opera boxes, wilting the elaborate floral arrangements and glittering guests, thickening the air with the rank sweetness of dying flowers and ripening flesh, the stench calling to mind the undertaker’s front parlor where once he’d worked as a mourning “mute.”

Since leaving the Roxbury House orphanage at sixteen, he’d worked any number of menial jobs—ditch digger, chimney sweep, and lastly railway navvie. The hard labor had broadened his shoulders and strengthened his back, as well as his will to make something of himself. When he’d entered the pub’s prize fight on a lark and stepped over the ropes to duke it out with the reigning contender, no one, including himself, had expected him to hold out for the requisite three minutes. He’d not only held. He’d won.

What irony that his present abject misery owed to how very far he’d risen in life. And yet at times such as this, when he found himself rubbing elbows with jewel-festooned females and their mustached husbands and beaux, the latter sporting shiny gold watch fobs and fat money clips, he felt the telltale tingling creeping into his palms and the fingers of his right hand, his
working
hand, starting up with the old familiar flexing jig.