"Where are you taking me this time?" She twisted her
face away from his hand. She had no clear sense of where
she was, and she probably had less than a quarter of an hour
to convince him to let her go.
"Going about London alone, you’ve been headed only one
place all along--a man’s bed." His voice was grim. "Mine."
The word was an unmistakable claim. His voice had the
timbre she’d first heard in the brothel. She turned to
judge the intent in those dark eyes. "You won’t . . . rape
me." She made herself say the word.
"I won’t read you Fordyce’s sermons on The Character and
Conduct of the Female Sex."
Flickering shadows in the interior of the hack revealed
only fragments of his appearance, the hard-edged profile,
the gleam in his dark eyes. She had not properly understood
him in the brothel. She had believed him preparing to bed
her, and his languid air as a Frenchman had made her think
she could overpower him and escape. But outside the brothel,
the fastidious vicomte did not exist.
"I don’t know who you are. Yesterday you wore a cravat
and silks, today a Belcher neckerchief and corduroy."
"Neighborhoods change. Depravity . . . remains the same."
"Do you have a name?"
His grin flashed briefly in the dark. "Will Jones.
Descended on both sides from a distinguished line of
fornicators back to the Conqueror himself."
"You didn’t have to hunt me down. I told you I would
repay you."
"Was that going to be before, or after your arrest for
stealing and fencing the goods?"
"I know exactly where those candlesticks are."
"I doubt it."
She took a calming breath. "You are interfering with my
plan."
"Which was going so well."
"There were setbacks, I grant you." She’d lost three
days. Her mother was three days closer to disaster.
"Setbacks, sweetheart? First Leary, then Wilde—both quite
willing to sell you, though to Leary’s credit, he had a much
higher appreciation of your value. How long did you expect
to pass as a boy in a boys’ school?"
"I was only going to stay the night." Her missteps
accumulated moment by wearying moment.
"What kept you?"
She wasn’t going to tell him about Robin. The little boy
had followed her about the school all day, and leaving him
behind with his vain hope that a phantom hero would come
over the rooftops to save him struck her as the one true
crime she’d committed. Stealing from Will Jones didn’t
count. "Did you come after me for the candlesticks or the
clothes?"
"Ah, Helen, for all your experience in Troy, how little
you know of men."
There was a teasing note in his voice. "It was only one
man, you know, Paris, endlessly Paris, and a woman can
hardly judge others by such a man. Really the rest of the
time, I was among the Trojan women. Imagine a room full of
women, fifty looms and tongues going at once, and old
queen’s stern eye on us every minute."
"Good at weaving, were you?" He laughed. The hack came
to a halt. Leaning close he told her, "You undid my first
efforts on your behalf, and when I do a thing, I like it to
stay done."
"Please, don’t trouble yourself further on my account.
I’m sure you have other business to attend to."
"I do, Helen, but you see, as I go about my business, you
keep turning up in suspicious places." Will extracted his
prisoner, unwound her from the fragrant blanket, paid the
hack driver, and led her through the usual passageways to
his door. "Home," he announced.
"I’ll be leaving in the morning."
"You are an ungrateful baggage, you know. You were
unable to get yourself out of either the brothel or the boys
school without my aid and my money."
"With which you are quite free for a man from your
neighborhood."
Argos in the shadows thumped his tale in welcome. "Argos
knows you already." Will made her sit two stairs above him
on the long staircase.
"What are you doing?"
"Removing my ruined boots from your feet. Harding will
take it ill if you track mud on the rugs."
"Harding?"
He could hear the weariness in her voice. He doubted
she’d slept much in three days. "You met Harding on the
ledge last night. A good man in at tight spot."
"You’ve been in tight spots with him before?"
"Dozens." The stockings she’d stolen from him stuck to
her feet in dark coins of dried blood. Bleeding determined
chit. He swung her over his shoulder and carried her
through the door.
She lay where he put her on the bed and her eyes fell
closed. "I warn you, whatever you mean to do to me, I’ll be
asleep."
"Oh I doubt that."
Her eyes opened at once as he secured her left arm to a
bedpost with a silken scarf. A red streak marked her wrist
where he had dangled her from the brothel window two nights
before.
"Do you mean to torture me?"
"Definitely."