Slightly Sinful (6 page)

"Then I am eternally in your debt," he said, "and in that of the sergeant, whom I must thank in person as soon as I am able." He thought of something suddenly and felt a flood of relief considering the fact that there was a detail far more important than the battle itself that he could not recall. "What did you do with my belongings?"

He watched her squeeze out the cloth and dip and squeeze it again before answering.

"You had been robbed," she said. "Of everything."

"Of . . ." He stared at her, aghast. "Of everything? All my clothes too?"

She nodded.

Good Lord! She had found him naked? But it was not embarrassment that caused him to shut his eyes tightly and clench his teeth, heedless for the moment of the pain the tension caused him. He could feel panic welling up inside him and threatening to burst forth. He wanted to throw back the bedcovers, leap from the bed, and run from the room. But where would he go? And for what purpose?

In search of his identity?

There was nothing left to help him remember.

Calm down, he told himself. Calm down. He had fallen from his horse and banged his head hard enough to give himself a concussion. He had the headache to prove it. He was fortunate to be alive. There probably really was a lump the size of a cricket ball on the side of his head. He must give his brain a chance to reorganize itself. He must give the swelling time to go down and his head wounds time to heal. He must give his fever time to recede completely. There was no hurry. Later today or tomorrow or the next day he would remember.

"What is your name?" she asked him as she pressed the cloth to one warm cheek.

"Go to the devil!" he exclaimed, and then snapped his eyes open to gaze up at her in instant remorse. Her teeth were sunk into her lower lip, and her eyes were wide with dismay.

"I am so sorry . . ."

"I do beg your pardon . . ."

They spoke simultaneously.

"I cannot remember," he admitted curtly, deliberately quelling the panic he felt.

"You must not worry about it." She smiled at him. "You will remember soon."

"Deuce take it, I do not even know my own name."

The horror of it grabbed at his stomach like a giant hand squeezing tightly. He fought a wave of nausea as he grasped her wrist with one hand and her other arm with the other. He was aware of pain in both his arms. He could see black and purple bruises all along his right arm.

"You are alive," she said, leaning a little closer, "and you are conscious again. Your fever seems to have gone down considerably. By some miracle you did not break any bones in your fall. Bridget says you are going to live, and I trust her judgment. Just give yourself some time. Everything will come back to you. Until it does, let your mind rest along with your body."

If he drew her any closer, he thought, he would be able to kiss her after all. What a stupid thought when there was not a bone in his body that did not feel sorely abused! Probably he would discover if he did kiss her that even his lips hurt.

"I owe you my life," he said. "Thank you. And how inadequate words can be sometimes."

She drew gently away from his grasp and swilled out the cloth again.

"Are you one of them?" he asked abruptly, closing his eyes and fighting nausea again. "Are you a . . . Do you work here?"

For a few moments all he heard was the trickling of water. He wished he could recall the question.

"I am here, am I not?" she said, the edge back in her voice.

"You do not look . . . You look different from the others," he said.

"Meaning that they look like whores and I do not?" she asked him. He could tell from the tone of her voice that he had offended her.

"I suppose so," he said. "I beg your pardon. I ought not to have asked. It is none of my business."

She laughed softly-it was somehow not a pleasant sound.

"That is my main appeal," she said, "that I look like an innocent, like a lady, like an angel, as you remarked earlier. It takes all types to run a successful brothel. Men have vastly different tastes when it comes to the women for whose favors they will pay. I cater to the taste for refinement and the illusion of innocence. I do innocence very well, would you not agree?"

Very well.

He opened his eyes to find her smiling at him as she dried her hands on a towel. It was a smile that matched the voice she was using-not quite pleasant.

"I do beg your pardon-again," he said. "I seem to have done nothing but insult you ever since I regained consciousness. I hope such unmannerly behavior is not habitual with me. Forgive me, please?"

His head was feeling like a balloon that was expanding to the point of bursting. His leg was throbbing like a giant drumbeat. There were other assorted ills clamoring only slightly less insistently for his attention too.

"Of course," she told him. "But I do not find this profession shameful or degrading or my fellow . . . whores less human or less precious than other women of my acquaintance. I will see you later. Geraldine will look after you in the meanwhile. Are you hungry?"

"Not really," he said.

He had offended her, he thought after she had gone. And she had every right to be annoyed with him. If it were not for her, he would probably be dead by now. And she and her friends had opened their home to him. She had given up her room for him. They were giving him twenty-four-hour care. He might have fared a great deal worse if he had been found by a respectable lady. Indeed, any lady would probably have screamed and run and then swooned after seeing his naked body and left him to die.

He chuckled softly at the mental image of such a scene but then felt a return of the nausea. And the panic.

What if his memory never returned?

CHAPTER IV

T HE KITCHEN WAS FILLED WITH DELICIOUS SMELLS when Rachel went down there after her sleep to see if there was anything she could do to help. Phyllis was stirring a large pot of soup. One counter was covered with freshly baked bread and currant cakes. The lid was off the big teapot and the kettle was boiling on the hearth.

"Did you have a good sleep?" Phyllis asked. "Everyone is up in William's room. Make the tea if you would be so good, Rachel, and we will take it up there. Is the other poor man still sleeping?"

Rachel had not looked in on him on her way down. She still felt somewhat embarrassed at what she had led him to believe-that she belonged here, that she worked with Bridget and Phyllis and the other two. At the same time, she felt annoyed by her own embarrassment-and by his questions. These ladies had taken her in when she had nowhere else to go. They had taken him in too. What did it matter that they were whores? They were also good people.

Sergeant Strickland had become a general favorite. Although he had lost an eye as well as his livelihood, he had refused from the start to wallow in self-pity. It had taken the combined willpower of them all to persuade him that he must remain in bed for at least a few days in order to give his wounds a chance to heal properly. Rachel was especially fond of him. He had come to the rescue of a stranger who was more severely wounded than himself.

"You won't look so bad once the eye socket has healed up and you have a patch to wear over it," Bridget was saying as Rachel came into the small attic room carrying the tea tray while Phyllis came behind her with a plate of thickly sliced bread generously buttered. Bridget had been cleansing the wound and was winding a clean bandage about the sergeant's head.

"I just lost my appetite," Phyllis said.

"You will look like a pirate, Will," Geraldine told him, "though I don't suppose you ever were a beauty anyway, were you?"

"That I were not, lass," he agreed with a hearty laugh. "But at least I had two eyes to go a-soldiering with. It is what I have done since I were a nipper. I don't know ought else. But I'll find something to earn my daily victuals with, I daresay. I'll survive."

"Of course you will," she said, leaning forward to pat his big hand. "But you are to stay in that bed for at least another day or two. That is an order. I'll put you back there with my own two hands if you try to move."

"I don't think you would have much success at that, lass," he said, "though I daresay you would give it a good try. I feel silly lying here when all I done is got an eye knocked out. But when I got up a while ago to go see that feller we brought here, I found I was swaying like a leaf in a breeze on the stairs and had to turn back. It's all this lying around that's doing it."

"Ah, fresh bread," Flossie said. "There is no better cook in this world than our Phyll. She is wasting her talents being a whore."

"I should be carrying that heavy tray, missy," the sergeant said to Rachel. "Except that I would probably walk into the table with it and shower everyone with boiling tea. But I will be better by tomorrow, I daresay. Would you ladies by any chance have need of the services of a hefty feller who looked ferocious even before he had to wear a black patch over his eye socket and would now make even the devil himself turn and run? To watch the door while you are busy at your work, perhaps, and to toss out any impertinent gent who forgets his manners?"

"You wish to be promoted from army sergeant to doorman at a brothel, William?" Bridget asked, biting into a slice of bread and butter.

"I wouldn't mind it until I get my feet under me, so to speak, ma'am," he said. "I wouldn't expect no more than my victuals and this bed here in return."

"The point is, though, Will," Geraldine said, "that we don't intend to stay here longer than we have to. Now that the armies have gone as well as most of the people who came to keep them company, business is not brisk. We need to go home, and the sooner the better. We have a villain to catch and take apart piece by piece, and we mean to pursue him until we find him."

"He took all the money we worked hard for four years to save," Bridget explained. "And we want it back."

"More important than that, though," Geraldine said, "we want him, the lying, smiling toad."

"Someone took off with your money?" The sergeant frowned ferociously as he took a plate with two hefty slices of bread and butter from Phyllis's hand. "And you are going after him? I'll come with you. One look at me will wipe any smile from his face, you mark my words. And I'll give him more than a look to remember me by. Where did he go?"

"That is the trouble," Bridget said with a sigh. "We are almost sure he has gone to England, William, but apart from that we do not know. England is rather a large place."

"Bridget and Flossie have written to all our sisterhood who can read," Geraldine said. "One of them will spot him, and even if they don't, we'll find him somehow-even if it takes a year. Or longer. What we need is a plan."

"What we need, Gerry," Flossie said dryly as Rachel handed about the tea, "is money. If we are to go jaunting about England, we are going to need plenty of it. And if we are jaunting about, we won't be able to work at the same time."

"Perhaps," Phyllis said, "we will go running after him and never find him and never recover our money. And in the meantime we will have spent a great deal more money and earned almost nothing. Perhaps it would be more sensible just to give up and go home and start to build our savings again."

"But there is the principle of the thing, Phyll," Geraldine said. "I for one am not willing to let him get away with it. He thinks he can simply because we are whores. He was not nearly as contemptuous about his thieving with everyone else. He took money from Lady Flatley and other ladies, according to Rache, but he told them it was for his charities. They may never even realize that their money went into his pockets instead and stayed there. But he never so much as mentioned charities to us. He just took everything, including our thanks. That is the point that has my blood boiling over. He made fools of us."

"Yes," Phyllis agreed. "We do need to teach him a lesson even if we end up making beggars of ourselves."

"What we need is money," Flossie said again, tapping her fingernails against the edge of her plate, "and plenty of it. How are we going to get our hands on it, though-apart from the obvious way, of course."

"I wish," Rachel said fervently, "I had access to some of my fortune."

The finger-tapping stopped and everyone looked at her with interest.

"You have a fortune, Rache?" Geraldine asked.

"She is Baron Weston's niece on her mother's side," Bridget reminded them.

"My mother left me her jewels," Rachel said. "But they will not come into my possession for another three years, until I am twenty-five. I am sorry I even mentioned them, since they can be of no earthly use to us now. For the next three years I am going to be the poorest of any of us."

"Where are they kept?" Flossie asked. "Are they somewhere where we can go and get them? It would not be theft, would it? They are yours."

"With black cloaks and masks and daggers shoved behind our ears as we climb ivy-covered walls in the dead of a moonless night?" Geraldine said. "I fancy it. Do tell, Rache."

But Rachel shook her head, laughing. "I do not even know," she said. "My uncle has charge of them, but I have no idea where he keeps them."

There was, of course, a way in which she could acquire her jewels before she was twenty-five, but that was not relevant to the current situation.