Ever His Bride (31 page)

Betts and Andy were bent over a shoe-form in
one of the stalls ahead of her. Betts was wisely doing her best to
keep Andy from spotting her, but the little boy was wriggling and
fussing and not paying attention to his stitching. He took an angry
stab at the shoe top and jammed the huge needle into his thumb. He
let out a wailing howl.

Felicity winced in sympathy but continued
trailing after Rundull.

Andy whirled away from Betts’s attempts at
comforting him, his injured thumb stuck like a stopper in his
mouth.

“Quiet that boy,” Rundull shouted across the
shop to a guard who was already on his way toward the
commotion.

Andy’s weepy gaze found Rundull, and then
Felicity. His eyes widened and his tears came even harder. He
stumbled to his feet and started toward her, sobbing. What could
she do but bend and let him come into her arms before the guard
could reach him.

Betts was on his heels. “Oh, miss, we’re
sorry for this. We are.”

Felicity hushed and cuddled the boy, and took
Betts into her arms all the while Rundull stood staring at what
must be a singular and most preposterous scene taking place in his
school.

“What the holy hell is going on here, Miss
Mayfield?”

The guard made a grab for both children, but
Felicity was faster and scrambled out of his reach behind a brick
pillar.

Rundull grabbed at the guard’s nape. “Stand
away, Flint I’ll take care of this!” He snapped the guard out of
his way and came toward Felicity.

Rundull’s face was rage-mottled, his neck
bulged out above his collar. He pointed at her. “You are fired,
Miss Mayfield.”

“I was never hired, Mr. Rundull.” She lifted
the children onto both hips and stomped away, surprised at her own
strength. “Come along, Giles!”

Rundull was on her before she had made a
half-dozen steps. “I’ll have you in jail for this.”

Felicity shoved the children behind her and
planted herself in front of Rundull. “I’ll gladly pay for the time
they spent here and for your efforts at bringing them. And for
that
boy’s charges as well.” Giles cringed when she pointed
at him.

“Pay me?” Rundull said with a sneer. “On a
cook’s salary?”

“I’m not a cook, Mr. Rundull, I’m a . . . .”
She couldn’t very well say she was a travel writer—what kind of
threat would that be? “I’m an investigative reporter for the
Hearth and Heath.”

“A reporter?” Rundull unballed his fists. His
shoulders dropped abruptly, and his voice mellowed as he
straightened his skewed neckcloth. “Madam, you have taken us wrong.
We are an apprentice school, doing our best here. I’m paid by a
number of London parishes to school their cast-off children—”

“Mr. Rundull, this is no kind of school!” She
looked out across the room and realized that work had come to a
standstill and every eye was on her.

“They learn the shoemaking trade,” Rundull
hissed, his attempt at hiding his anger from a reporter gone in a
puff of smoke.

“And they pay for it with their crooked
backs!”

Rundull growled and grabbed a double hold of
her hair at the back of her head, and yanked her against him. “It’s
time you leave here, Miss Mayfield. But you’ll be leaving with a
strap laid across your back to remind you of your visit.”

She sent Betts and Andy scurrying away from
her and from Rundull’s wrath.

“Let go of me!” Felicity dug her fingernails
into his wrist, but he shoved her forward. She couldn’t afford to
panic, or lose her head, but she had the horrible feeling that she
had only made matters worse than ever. Any moment Rundull’s guards
would descend on them all. And what would happen to the
children?

“Leave her alone, I tell you!” Giles came
shouting out of nowhere, and leaped upon Rundull’s back, fists
flailing.

“No, Giles! Let me—” Felicity pushed at
Rundull, but he threw Giles off and tightened his grip on her hair
and dragged her toward the door. Giles had the sense to keep Andy
and Betts out of the way when they tried to help her.

“This way, missy.” As Rundull propelled her
forward, a great roaring cleaved the air, a paralyzing sound that
sliced through the stone walls.

“Keep your filthy hands off my wife!”

Suddenly Felicity was looking past Rundull’s
shoulder into the eyes of an angel—a seething, angry-beyond-words
angel.

Rundull’s forward motion stopped abruptly.
His fists opened so fast that she stumbled forward and landed on
her hands and knees. Rundull then made a gagging sound as he arched
into the air, a rangy, flightless bird twisting against a sky of
rafters.

Then her husband stood above her, his face
gone hard as marble, his eyes locked on hers.

Hunter had seen it all through a red haze,
his vision narrowed tightly on his wife and the suicidal man who’d
seemed bent on hurting her. She was rumpled beyond recognition, her
skirts floured and blackened, her hair sprung every which way. He
sought details— his wife’s enduring, familiar details. Gratitude in
her eyes, a trembling courage on her lips, she stood up and brushed
herself off.

His wife. Yes, Felicity. Her lovely details:
quizzical brows, her head canted in concern, a cautious step toward
him.

“Mr. Claybourne?”

Details only. He didn’t dare look around; he
knew what he would find: spidery, yellow-stained fingers; bent and
broken limbs. The stink. The tanning pits. He had recognized the
smell the moment the train had pulled into town. He’d fought the
effects, chided himself for his weakness. But he had come here
anyway, against his judgment, against every promise he had ever
made to himself that he wouldn’t.

He’d done it for
her.

“Hunter?”

She touched his hand and he flinched.

Rundull stirred. “Get off my property,
sir!”

He straightened from his stupor. He yanked
Felicity roughly behind him. “Be thankful you escaped with your
life.” He scooped up Felicity’s fallen portmanteau and took her
elbow. “Come.”

But she stayed rooted to the planking, caught
in Rundull’s mire. “I can’t leave, Mr. Claybourne. Not without the
children.”

“You will come with me, wife.” His hands were
clammy and cold, didn’t work as they should, but he tried to pull
her along with him.

“No, Mr. Claybourne!”

She slipped easily out of his hands and ran
to the two children who’d been cowering between crates of finished
shoe tops. She grabbed them up into her arms while her young
cutpurse stood nearby. Giles. The boy from London. She’d come to
Blenwick for
him
.

“I will not leave without these children, Mr.
Claybourne.”

Rundull puffed himself up like a toad. “You
can’t take them. I am paid twelve pounds a year per student. I’ll
not let them go for a penny less.”

“I need a loan, Mr. Claybourne,” she said,
fixing her glare on Rundull. “Thirty-six pounds.”

“Per year,” Rundull added, tapping his tented
fingertips together. “Times ten years for the girl and the older
boy, and twelve for the youngest.”

“I need three-hundred eighty-four pounds, Mr.
Claybourne.”

But Hunter couldn’t move, was rooted to the
sagging wooden flooring, barely able to concentrate, drenched in
sweat. The corners of the room hung in boiling shadows, the
twilight too weak to filter through the filthy glass. Welcome
shadows that blotted his vision. Yet he didn’t have to see to
remember.

“Please, Mr. Claybourne.”

His guts were knotted and nagging. He would
surely disgrace himself if he turned back to her.

“Mrs. Claybourne,” he managed, his breath
escaping in trembling, ragged torrents. “You can’t rescue them
all—”

“Maybe not, Mr. Claybourne, but I can rescue
these three.”

She stood like a pagan warrior out of myth, a
child on each hip, indictment in her eyes. A threat to everything
he held dear.

Still, he lifted the banknotes from his
breast pocket, then dropped them on the floor. “Tell the bastard to
keep the bloody change.”

He waited until his deluded wife and her
wretched foundlings had gone ahead, placing himself between her and
the workhouse. She was a cloud of freshness amidst the
foulness.

And then he noticed it. Noticed the lack. His
stomach reeled.

Her wedding ring. It was gone.

Felicity watched her silent husband load her
portmanteau into the private carriage he’d hired.

“You’re not going with us?” she asked, hardly
expecting an answer from him. He hadn’t spoken more than a word to
her since he’d dropped her off at the inn with the children the
night before.

“No.” His eyes followed Andy and Betts into
the carriage as if they were vermin. He didn’t even look at
Giles.

Felicity had spent hours cleaning up the two
younger children, scrubbing years of neglect off their tender skin,
from under their fingernails, soaking them until they both were
pink and glowing and squealing with laughter. She’d burned their
clothes, and they had slept in Claybourne’s shirts.

Giles’s mood had been as detached as
Claybourne’s had been. And she hadn’t pressed him. There would be
time for that later. He took his own bath down the hall and
grudgingly wore the clothes she found for him. He’d slept in the
chair that Claybourne had claimed the night before, and now sat
stiffly inside the carriage looking out the window. She wondered
what he would do when they returned to London.

She had bought clothes for Andy and Betts,
and now they looked like any other children one might see in
Kensington Park.

And still Claybourne disapproved of them.

All of which drove her temper through the top
of her head. “May I have a word with you, Mr. Claybourne?”

He grunted and followed her a few steps to
the hitching post in front of the Brightwater, but said nothing,
keeping his gaze fixed on something in the distance.

“Are they so far below you, sir?” she asked,
keeping her voice hushed so the children wouldn’t overhear. “Is
that why you won’t ride to London with us?”

“I have business to tend to.”

“They’re children, Mr. Claybourne. If you’d
only give them time—”

“Do not board them in my house.” His eyes
were clear when he fixed them on her, and as distant as the
hills.

“In that dismal rabbit warren you call a
home? They’re better off on the streets of Bethnal Green.”

His hands gripped the hitch rail, his
knuckles white, his fingers flexing. “Then take them there, Mrs.
Claybourne. Leave them. And let them forget about you.”

“I will not let them forget. They will know
that I care.”

“How very honorable of you. And what of all
the other children enrolled in the Blenwick School for Apprentices?
Will they know you care?”

She had tried to put the horrible truth from
her mind, but he bewildered her with his guttural questions. “They
must know I care: I cooked for them—”

“Oh, yes, Mrs. Claybourne. How sweet, Mrs.
Claybourne! A hearty meal and one of your charming smiles, perhaps
a heart-stealing caress from your mothering hand—just enough to
tantalize, just enough to send a child to bed with his hopes
soaring. And when they woke this morning to the hunger and that
spark of hope gnawing in their bellies, how do you think they felt
when they remember you deserted them?”

“I didn’t desert them.”

“Would you care to go back and ask them?
Rundull’s little apprentices, his bony-fingered drudges stitching
shoe tops for no pay at all, while Rundull himself collects three
pence a pair from a partner in the London slop-trade, twelve pounds
per child per annum, and calls himself a school.”

“The slop-trade?”

“Those fashionable shoes you’re wearing no
doubt came from a place just like Rundull’s. If you look closely
enough inside, madam, by the instep, or down near the toe, you’ll
find bloodstains—”

Arthur’s words exactly. “Stop it, Mr.
Claybourne!”

“Blood from a pricked finger, or from a chunk
of flesh gouged out by a dull-bladed awl—”

“How do you know this? Are you a partner in
one of these enterprises, Mr. Claybourne? Do you—”

His head reared back. “It doesn’t matter how
I know!” He recovered and bore down on her, his dark eyes hot and
unrelenting. “Did you see their faces when they looked at you? Did
you see precious hope twisted up in despair, Mrs. Claybourne? Did
you smell it? Could you taste it? Because I did. God help me, I
did.”

Felicity swiped at the tears coursing down
her cheeks. “But we brought out three—”

“And left how many more behind, praying for
their own bright angel? Did you think of them?”

“We had no choice.”

“Self-serving charity, Mrs. Claybourne! The
kind that makes you
feel
good.”

“Yes, it does, but—”

“God damn you, woman!”

“Mr. Claybourne, how dare you speak—”

But he took her by the elbow and lifted her
into the carriage step.

“When are you coming home, Mr.
Claybourne?”

“I don’t know.” He ground a twenty pound note
into her hand and strode away without a backward glance.

Andy and Betts huddled together beside her,
their eyes wide in dread. They couldn’t have heard or understood
the sense of the argument, but they must have felt the heat.

Giles had obviously heard everything. He sat
opposite, his jaw clenched and working. She knew he wanted to say
something, but he kept his opinions to himself and settled his gaze
out the window as the carriage jolted off.

“Well, my loves, we’re on our way to London.”
Felicity wiped her nose on her kerchief.

Andy and Betts snuggled next to her, one
under each arm, leaving her to stare at the empty seat where
Claybourne ought to be.

He was quite mad. He had damned her for
caring at all about the children, and then had damned her for not
caring enough. It was one or the other, Mr. Claybourne. She
couldn’t be blamed for both.