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He must have spent the entirety of the morning riding here. All that, just to meet them for an hour?
His eldest brother showed no sign of fatigue, however. Instead, he simply shifted the satchel he carried.
“Well.” Smite spoke first. “I suppose we could set aside our haring and sallying long enough for a brief repast.”
“Not at all. There’s no need to make the slightest alteration in your plans on my account.” Ash grinned. “I can keep up with the lot of you.”
Smite glanced at Mark, his eyes widening. That slight entreaty was as good as a plea on bended knee for him.
“Keep up?”
“I’m coming with you,” Ash said. His jaw set as he spoke, and he looked away from them. “Unless—”
“Can you neglect your business affairs so long?” Mark asked.
“Can you neglect your wife so long?” Smite asked, perhaps a little more slyly.
Ash let out a sigh. “Margaret suggested, in very strong terms, that I should come along.”
Mark exchanged another glance with Smite. Ash and Margaret had been happily married for five years; Mark couldn’t imagine Margaret sending him away.
He was trying to work out a way to politely ask what might have happened, when Smite broke in, no politeness at all. “Good Lord, Ash, what did you do?”
“Nothing!” Ash said. “Or—at least—nothing I shouldn’t be doing.”
The track across the field, this close to town, was wide enough that they could all three walk abreast, and so they started down the path.
“Nothing?”
“If you must know,” Ash said in patronizing tones, “she is increasing.”
“Oh, congratulations!” Mark clapped his brother on the back.
Smite shook his hand, and Ash’s smile broadened, as if he’d done something very clever.
“But now I’m doubly astonished,” Mark continued. “I wouldn’t have thought you could be pried from her side under those circumstances, not with a full harness of oxen.”
His eldest brother stiffened. “She says,” Ash muttered, “that I hover.”
Mark stifled a laugh, just as Smite hid his face.
“I don’t hover,” Ash said. “Do I hover?”
“Surely not!” Mark said, overly polite.
Smite grinned. “Never.”
“I couldn’t imagine such a thing.”
“Never in a million years.”
“Hovering,” Mark said, “puts me in mind of a butterfly—a light creature, flitting about from flower to flower, delicate as you please, vanishing at the first sudden movement.”
“And that,” Smite said, completing Mark’s thought, “seems rather too circumspect for you. My guess is that you were circling overhead, like some kind of obscene vulture.”
“Waiting to pounce on any weakness.”
Ash put on hands on a hip. “You unholy pack of ruffians,” he said in amusement. “I do not—”
“Only to give aid, of course,” Mark said. “You are perhaps the most benevolent vulture I have ever met.”
Smite sniggered. “Albeit not the most polite.”
“You two are the most captious lot of ingrates ever to walk the face of Britain.” Even though Ash’s words were harsh, his tone was playful. And for the first time since Jessica had rejected his proposal, Mark realized that he was smiling. The future no longer seemed quite so bleak and barren. His brothers were together; and whatever waited could not be so impossible. “In all seriousness.” Ash took a deep breath. “Will I be in the way?”
It wasn’t Mark’s place to answer that question. He looked to Smite, who looked away.
He’d told Jessica that it was hard for Smite to make friends. That wasn’t even the half of it. Smite didn’t keep overnight servants. He wouldn’t stay at a hotel where they might be bothered in the evening. He wouldn’t even stay in Ash’s townhouse in London; he had a flat he kept there for precisely that purpose. There were maybe three people in the world who understood why. Ash wasn’t one of them.
Smite’s lips thinned. He took a deep breath. “Don’t worry, Ash,” he said. “We’re an unholy pack of ruffians here. You should fit right in.”
A walking trip. Nothing to do but move and talk with his brothers. He’d not have to see a thing that reminded him of Jessica for close to a week. Mark smiled. Why, by the time he got back to London, he would have forgotten Jessica entirely.
THE HEADLINE on the London paper read: Sir Mark: Seduced?!
Jessica could read the words from across the square. The post-boy was already mobbed by a crowd, eager to fork over their coins for this news—and this was only the first issue to be printed. In a week or two, she would be able to collect the remainder of her earnings from Nigel Parret, and she could leave London. What she would do thereafter, she didn’t yet know.
But she had one last piece of business to conduct. She ducked into the taproom where she’d seen Sir Mark for the first time. She had put off this interview as long as she could. She needed to tell George Weston what she should have told him months ago. She needed to tell him to go to the devil.
He was waiting for her at a table in the back. He wasn’t unpleasant to look at—brown hair, brown eyes and an indistinct nose. Still, as she smoothed her skirts away and sat down before him, her teeth gritted. Every inch of her skin remembered what he’d done, recalled it in a visceral way that she could not forget. She felt faintly nauseous. The very air around him felt like a punch to the stomach.
Not that he had ever hit her. If anyone had asked, she wouldn’t have said that he was a bad man. He went to church service regularly. Back when he’d been her protector, he’d even been…well, she couldn’t call him kind. But he’d never beaten her. Up until the end, she would have said that he seemed like a decent fellow.
But he’d set a bounty on Mark’s head in an attempt to ruin the man’s reputation. And there was the matter of what he’d done to her. He wasn’t bad. Still, she could never forgive him, and now that she knew what a good man was, she could recall precisely how awful he’d made her feel. She’d been steeling herself to endure his presence ever since she’d made the appointment.
He smiled as she sat. “Congratulations, Jess. I knew you could do it—you just needed a little prodding on my part.”
Jess again. Mark had called her Jessica. As if she were a full person, not a truncated portion of one. “That’s a bit premature, don’t you think? I’ve not yet given you my report.”
“I can guess.” His smile stretched out, lazy, sure of itself. “Today, the first installment of a fallen woman’s account appeared in the London Social Mirror. It’s titled, ‘The Seduction of Sir Mark.’ The afternoon edition of every paper has picked up the refrain. I’m not an idiot, Jess. Well done. Everyone is already talking. And serializing the story? That was brilliant. Nobody will ever forget this. When Lefevre retires, I’ll take his place.”
Jessica thought of Mark’s ring. It hung on a chain from her neck. What would he do, if she showed it to him? “I admit, I don’t understand the ambition. You never struck me as one who cared about the poor.”
He shrugged. “What, and pass up the chance to determine which of my acquaintances can harness the product of the workhouses?
The Commission decides who gets the contracts for the food, the blankets. They decide what the workhouse produces, and who benefits from it. A man who has that kind of power can get a great many favors. And it will undoubtedly serve as a stepping-stone to other, greater, callings.”
Jessica felt her lip curl a little.
“The opportunity would have been wasted on Sir Mark,” Weston said. “He has no head for politics or organization—just philosophy and ethics. You’ve not just done me a favor—you’ve done a favor to all of England.”
Jessica shook her head. “You are still making a great many assumptions. I came here because—”
