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He shook his head and rubbed at one eye. “Are you yelling at me because I like you?”
“Yes!”
“Well, get used to it,” he shot back. “Because I can’t get you out of my mind. I think of you all the time. And you can’t shout loud enough to make me stop.”
“Would you care to place a wager?”
“Just go ahead and try,” he said coldly, rummaging in his pockets. “Here.” He pulled out his fob watch, flicked the gold face open. “It’s three past eight. Now go on. Scream as loudly as you like. Don’t mind me. I’ll just stand here and keep time until you’re bored.”
He didn’t need to tell her about the ticking of time. She had two days to seduce him, and she couldn’t bear to do it any longer. He stared back, tapping his foot. And it was only then that the utter, impossible ridiculousness of it swept over her and she began to laugh. He was by her side in a trice, his arms around her. Her shoulders shook. She wasn’t sure if she was laughing or crying until his hand ran down her head.
“There now,” he said. “Has it really been so long since someone took your side?”
“It’s been ages. Too long for me to remember.” It had long ago ceased to be a matter of if she would have to rely on herself—just how much it would sting when her legs were kicked out from under her.
After they left the buildings behind them, she took a deep breath.
“Sir Mark. What you said at the meeting tonight—it struck me.” That didn’t describe what she’d felt. He’d looked like an avenging archangel, ready to rain fire and brimstone down on the men around him.
“You don’t say.” His tone was dry.
“Why have you chosen to champion male chastity? Why not focus on—oh, the Corn Laws or suffrage or education? There are myriad social causes you could champion. Most of them are easier than the one you’ve chosen.”
“Well.” He slanted her a look. “When men are unchaste, women bear the burden. You see—”
She moved in front of him swiftly, and he stopped. She raised one hand to his mouth, touching his lips. Cutting off those words, before he could speak them. His breath wafted through the knit of her gloves.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want to hear the theory. I’ve read your book. But when you spoke today… A man doesn’t get so angry about something unless it’s personal. I am not asking why someone should be chaste. I am asking why you in particular have dedicated so much of your life to the pursuit.”
He stared at her. No warm breath touched her fingers.
Slowly, she pulled her hand away, wondering if he was about to denounce her.
Instead, he shook his head. “You know, nobody has ever asked me that question before. Not even my brothers.”
“I have always been particularly impertinent.”
Mark met her eyes again. There was nothing importunate about his gaze—no ogling, no sense that he was measuring her for his bed. Still, she saw in him a fierce, possessive hunger. “Impertinence suits you,” he finally said and held out his arm for her. She took it once more, and they began walking again.
He said nothing more for a few minutes, but by the tense jump of the muscles in his arm, she could tell that he’d not forgotten her query.
“It was my mother,” he finally told her.
“I’ve heard of your mother. People talk of her sometimes.”
His tone grew warier. “What have you heard?”
“She was a generous, godly woman.” Jessica didn’t want to say much more. Men reacted strangely when you criticized their mothers—even if they’d just done it themselves.
“Ha. Surely the gossips have told you more than that.”
“She was a mill owner’s wife. I heard that when your father passed away, she grieved. And that in her grief, she became a little…strange.”
“She went mad.”
Jessica nodded in acquiescence. “It must have been difficult, to have a mother so overtaken with sadness—”
“She didn’t go mad with grief,” Mark interrupted. “She hated my father. She was always quite religious—extraordinarily so. He, in turn, scarcely cared to attend service. That alone wouldn’t have done the trick. But he was not faithful to her. She got the notion in her head that he’d forced the women who’d worked in his mill years before to whore for him in exchange for a position. And that when they complained, he brought in laborsaving machinery, so he could sack the ones who caused the unrest.”
“Oh.”
“She wasn’t entirely wrong about that,” he added. “A handful, certainly. All of them? No. But she had this notion that our entire family wealth was built on his debauchery. She began to see sin everywhere. She began to hate money, to hate every thing that reminded her of him. If she saw a woman on the streets, she instantly believed her to be a victim of my father’s profligacy. She began to sell…at first, just things. Then she started to give away the respectable competence my father had left. When my sister fell ill, she refused to pay a physician, saying it was God’s will whether she lived or died.”
The sun was setting. It hung, red and warm at the edge of the field. It painted his cheeks in orange, his hair in rust.
“She died. I scarcely remember that. I was still young at the time. But I think my mother took her death as a sign of God’s judgment. After that, she became very strange indeed. Soon, very little remained of the legacy my father had left. Very little except my brothers. Have I mentioned that my brothers look a great deal like my father? That didn’t help. I take after her more. So she beat them, and took me along with her on her errands of mercy. I met the poor, the weak, the afflicted.”
“She was mad.”
“I know,” he said quietly. “But…underneath that insanity, there was a core of truth to everything she said. I’ve seen the ones who are destroyed in the wake of profligacy. The man takes his pleasure, and women and children suffer. My mother most of all. I don’t know what she would have been like if he’d been faithful. She never would have been comfortable, I don’t think, but at least she might not have tried—”
He caught himself and stared off into the distance, his shoulders pinched together. He looked miserable, so lost in memory.
“Ah,” she said softly. “Is that all, then?” She’d meant to interrupt his grim reverie, to put a soft smile on his face. Instead he looked at her, his eyes haunted.
“No,” he said softly. “It is not.” He turned from her and began to walk down the path again.
She followed.
“She nearly killed my brother, Smite. It was a…a matter of punishment and neglect. Not intentional, I don’t think. But she’d gone so far beyond rationality. She put him in the cellar and hid the key from me. Ash had been in India at that time, and we’d gotten word that he’d be coming home soon. When I managed to get Smite out, we walked the thirty miles to Bristol to wait for him.”
He wasn’t looking at her, but when she put her hand on his arm, his fingers closed around hers.
“We waited three months. We ran out of the shillings we’d taken within the first month. We spent the next two months on the streets. I don’t know if you can understand what it means to be starving—not merely hungry, nor even famished, but slowly starving. You stop caring about anything except food—not laws, not manners, not right nor wrong. The world disappears, until there is nothing but you and the constant struggle to put something— anything—in your belly.”
She’d never got to that point. She’d never come near. All she could do was listen in horror.
Mark didn’t look at her. “At least,” he said, “that was how it felt to me. My brother, now…Smite would have fed his last scrap to a hungry cat. He had no sense of self-preservation, not even when matters were at their worst. We hid in an alley one evening. I woke in the middle of the night, to see a woman walking through the gloom. She didn’t see me. There was a pile of refuse in t
he back of the alley—moldering bits of food that even I would not have tried to eat, discarded fabric that had worn so thin it was little more than a collection of threads—that sort of stuff. She set a bundle on the heap, and then, without looking back, walked away.”
Jessica felt a pit in her stomach. She could feel her hands start to shake. She knew what was coming. In the wretched sisterhood of whores and courtesans, there were some things that never changed.
“I went,” he said. “I looked. Of course I looked. But the bundle was an infant—tiny and red. It could not have been more than a few hours old.”
