Lady of Desire (25 page)

“What of love?”

“Love?” She gave a short, wry laugh. “Why, that seems to be the one luxury I cannot afford.”

“My, my,” he said softly with a regretful gaze, “what has become of my little romantic?”

“Oh, please,” she retorted. “You know the proverb, Billy. ”Better an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave‘.“ She quoted the saying with a gleam in her eye.

Rackford snorted. “By all means, marry him, then, if that’s what you want—a dry, dull old man who makes you feel nothing. But I don’t understand why this notion of freedom is so blasted important to you.”

“I’ll tell you why. Because I’m not going to love someone only to have them abandon me,” she bit out. Realizing she had spoken more vehemently than she had intended, she quickly fixed her stare down the shady lane again and walked on.

He raised his eyebrow and followed her. “Abandon you?”

“Yes,” she replied in a prickly tone. She argued with herself to keep quiet, but could not hold back. “I know what Society husbands are like, Lord Rackford. They’re not much different than brothers, in fact. They give their wives a beautiful home, then keep them there as though it were a cage, all under the auspices of protecting them. Meanwhile, the men go striding off into the world—having adventures, doing interesting things, making a difference. For the wives, it’s nothing but card parties and social calls and gossip over tea. No, thank you. I will not waste my whole life pretending to be interested solely in the latest style of bonnet and the scandal of the month. I will chart my own course, go where the devil I please, and answer to no one—and if that means marrying an old man so I can be free all the sooner, so be it!” Her impassioned voice broke off abruptly; she realized she had nearly been shouting. Her chest heaved with the fierceness of her tirade; her cheeks were flushed. “I’m sorry,” she forced out tautly as she turned away, mortified by her outburst, but Rackford gently grasped her arm.

“If you were mine,” he said quietly, firmly, looking into her eyes, “I’d take you with me when I went ‘striding off into the world'.”

Her heart twisted painfully. “Don’t, Billy.” With a confused wince, she pulled away from his light hold. “Don’t look at me like that. Don’t speak to me of marriage anymore, I pray you. I’ll only hurt you. I’ve offered you my friendship; take it or leave it. If you can’t accept that—”

“Easy, sweeting,” he soothed in a deep, soft voice, staring into her eyes. “Don’t be afraid of me. I will do… whatever you want.”

She gazed at him intensely, clinging to the steadiness he offered. He nodded in reassurance and took her hand. He started to walk on, but she stayed.

He turned back to her in question, gazed at her for a long moment, then moved closer. Lifting his gloved fingertip to her cheek, he brushed a blowing curl back from her face.

She shuddered and closed her eyes briefly, leaning her cheek against his knuckles. “Billy?”

“Yes, Jacinda?”

When her eyes swept open, they stared at each other. Her wistful gaze sank to his lips.

She was unaware that she had been leaning toward him in breathless longing until a demure “Ahem!” sounded from a few feet away.

Lizzie’s tactful warning snapped them both out of the enchantment. Rackford dropped his hand to his side again. Jacinda glanced over in embarrassment, but Lizzie had buried her nose firmly in her book once more.

Blushing, Jacinda fidgeted with her blowing pink scarf and cleared her throat. “Forgive me; I can’t imagine how we wandered onto the subject of me. You were going to tell me how you came to be involved in the gang.”

He glanced at their chaperon, then smiled wryly at Jacinda. “Why don’t we call Miss Carlisle over to listen, too? That will save you the trouble of having to repeat it all later.”

At his words, Jacinda’s coral lips formed an O of guilty indignation, but to Rackford’s amused satisfaction, she did not attempt to deny the charge. Flashing him a playful scowl, she called her friend over eagerly.

Truly, the two young girls entertained the hell out of him, he thought sardonically, regarding them in protective affection as they took their places on a bench in the shade and waited in kittenish solemnity for him to begin.

He glanced warily from one lovely creature to the other, touched by how sheltered they were. For that reason, he masked the true brutality of his boyhood experiences behind a casual manner, as though he were relating the plot of some amusing fiction he had read. Breezing over that final, savage beating from his father, he spoke of how he had walked from Cornwall to London, staying away from the main roads and traveling by night to evade the men his father had sent to find him.

He told them of that first night on his own—how he had curled up among the roots of an ancient oak, wrapped in his coat, and had lain, bruised and shivering in the chill of the spring night, looking up at the crescent moon between the whispering branches. The broad bands of blue and indigo clouds around the moon had made him ache for his beloved sea with the seals and the mermaids and all the old legends, but no matter how it broke his heart, he vowed that night never to set foot in Cornwall again.

Instead, he had set out for London to find his fortune.

The girls listened with intent, softhearted gazes as his tale unfolded.

For several days, he had pushed eastward, traveling off the main roads through the fields and byways, refilling his canteen in country wells. He had discovered the small bag of coins that Mrs. Landry, their cook, had slipped into his knapsack, probably half her life savings. Though he had preserved his rations as best he could, his belly was grumbling the day he arrived on the rural outskirts of London. He had been a sorry sight, the April rain drizzling down on him, his eye still black from his father’s fist. He remembered his morbid fascination upon seeing the corpses of some criminals who had been gibbeted on the brow of a hill and left there as a dire warning to all who would contemplate evildoing. He had watched them swinging in their nooses, then turned his back on them and marched on toward London with determination, wondering what he should become.

He had considered enlisting in the army, but soon found out that he would have to show his birth certificate to the recruitment officer to prove that he was at least fifteen: He was only thirteen. He had applied at a fine stable as a groom, hoping to get work exercising the horses, but the jockeys there were grown men who only came up to his chin: He was too big. He had thought of taking up some respectable trade, only to learn that he would have to go before the magistrate and bind himself to a master craftsman for a term of seven years. For this, he was much too impatient.

Out of food, money, and ideas, he had stepped in out of the rain at a tavern where the kindly innkeeper had told him of the brickyard nearby where a boy could earn his bread and board along with a few shillings by working as an “off-bearer.” Following the old man’s directions, he had found the large, busy brickyard easily enough. His employment there, however, had only lasted one day.

The instant he saw the place and the overseers driving the boys, he had doubts, but since he had so few other options, in he went to learn how to make bricks. Noting his tall height and sturdy build, the overseer had quickly agreed to give him a chance.

The work of the off-bearers, he explained to Jacinda and Miss Carlisle, was simple, consisting mainly of carefully picking up the wet, newly formed bricks from the brickmaster and carrying them to the drying fields a fair distance away. Carrying, carrying, back and forth, like ants in a line. It was messy work and quite precarious for gangly pubescent boys. Though the boys had not been allowed to talk to each other during work, one had quickly drawn his attention: a skinny, curly-haired charity boy in a green workhouse uniform. The puny lad could not seem to carry a brick without dropping it. Each wet brick the master gave him was soon splattered on the ground, a mud pie.

The girls laughed, listening in absorption as he described his increasing difficulty in keeping his mouth shut as the big, potbellied overseer had bullied and berated the charity boy for his ineptitude.

“But when I saw him strike the boy, something inside of me… snapped.”

The girls sobered, and his expression turned grim. He shook his head and told them how he had hurled the muddy wet brick he had been carrying at the overseer.

“It hit him square in the back, knocking him off balance, leavin‘ a big muddy smear on his shirt.”

The overseer had whirled around in fury, standing two feet taller than him, but the man’s black look had not stopped Billy Albright’s charge. “
Leave him alone
!” he had screamed.

“I was so enraged, I could barely see straight.”

He told them of how the owner of the brickyard had come rushing out of his office and had broken up the row. The charity boy and he were brought into the office, reprimanded, and summarily dismissed.

“And that,” he said, “is how I met Nate Hawkins.”

Jacinda’s eyes widened with recognition at the name, for she had met Nate that night in Bainbridge Street.

“Nate complained bitterly against me for getting him sacked from his job,” Rackford said with a smile, “but we fell in together quite naturally, since he was an orphan and had no one and would have rather died than go back to the workhouse. In the end, the old barkeep, Sam Burroughs, hired us on as potboys to help out around the pub. He housed us in a loft in the outbuilding where the chickens and goats slept, but we were happy, for we had an easy master and there was always plenty to eat.”

Then he went on to describe how, one rainy night, three men in black greatcoats had arrived at Sam Burroughs’s alehouse.

Billy had been carrying a rack of clean beer mugs out from the back when he saw them. He had instantly recognized them as his father’s servants. They were asking old Sam if he had seen a blond, green-eyed boy of thirteen summers. Billy had silently retreated into the back, left the rack of tankards on the floor, grabbed Nate by his shirt, and fled.

After that narrow escape, they had traipsed into the heart of the city, once again on the scrounge for food. Within a few days, he had managed to get them both hired onto a Thames fishing boat, where they were assigned all the most unpleasant tasks: tarring the decks, gutting the catch, bailing out the bilge.

“Nate hated it,” he told the girls. “The captain was a decent man, but the crew were a rough lot. We were afraid of them and soon found we had good reason to be.”

After a fortnight of laboring like dogs, they had received their pay of two shillings each and were given permission to go ashore, but late that night, they ran afoul of the drunken first mate. The girls gasped as he described how the man, armed with a knife, had threatened them and demanded their pay.

“We had no choice but to give him our money. He said if we told anyone, he would gut us and feed our bodies to the fish.”

“How awful!” Jacinda exclaimed.

“We did not deem it wise to return to the boat,” he said drily. “By the time dawn came, we were once more faced with the question of how we were going to survive. It so happened that we were sitting by the river pondering our fate when we noticed the usual parade of young mud larks wading out into the water at low tide.”

These, he explained, were the poorest of the poor, beggar children who searched the riverbed each day at low tide, trying to find dropped coins, bits of coal that may have fallen off the passing barges, or anything of value they might resell for a few pennies. That morning, not knowing what else to do, Billy and Nate had rolled up their trousers and tried their hands at mud-larking. It was not long, however, before a small Cockney bruiser had come marching through the fog toward them.

“What are you blighters doing ‘ere?” he had demanded pugnaciously. “I’m Cullen O’Dell, and this is my stretch of the river!”

From the first, Nate and Billy had been impressed by him. Cullen O’Dell was pure Cockney, born in earshot of the Bow bells. City-born and city-bred, he knew how to fend for himself. Though they had first encountered him mud-larking, he had made it clear that this low business was only a sideline for him. He had claimed that if a boy was smart, he could live like a king in the city. To their surprise, he had offered to help when they explained what had happened to them. He knew a good old gentleman, he said, who would give them food and a place to stay.

They had been skeptical, but without any other choices at hand, they had gone with him. The place where O’Dell had assured them they could find shelter had turned out to be a shabby, dilapidated flash house, and the old gentleman’s line of business had been training and dispatching young thieves. As long as the children under his dubious care brought back wallets, watches, silk handkerchiefs, and such, he provided them with enough bread, milk, and weak broth to subsist on, and a kind of home.

“My goodness,” the girls breathed.

“That very day, Nate and I went with a group of boys to a hanging outside of Newgate. I remember it like it was last week. The crowd that had gathered was in the thousands. I had never seen a hanging before, but Nate and I had been instructed to forget about the show up on the gallows and watch O’Dell and the other boys instead.”

He described how the other boys had dodged about, neatly picking the crowd clean. He remembered how his heart had pounded in fear that one of them would get caught, but none did. They had even made it look fun. The irony of robbing the citizenry of London even as the trio of highwaymen were being led to the gallows seemed not to have struck the young thieves, but it had certainly not been lost on Nate and him.

Their work done, the boys had all walked back together to the flash house. The others had been chattering about how pleased the old gentleman was going to be with their success, but Billy had been silent, brooding on the high consequences to be paid if one were caught.

“I suddenly asked the boys why they should hand over all their profits to the old gentleman when it was they who took all the risk,” he said to his fair listeners. “ Needless to say, the question made them rather uneasy, but I showed them that the expenses he paid to feed and house them were only a fraction of the profits the children were bringing in.”