Page 68 of Waiting for Love

“Then you are the friend?”

“Yes.”

“Can you help? Cris is in a bad way.”

A shock of cold fear ran down his neck. “Drunk?” he said, trying to scoff.

“No, sir. He ain’t had a drink in days. Nor nothing. He said not to fetch Lord Taverston, but I don’t want him dying in—”

“Dying!”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll come.”

Daisy did not take him into the brothel, but to the cowshed behind it.

“T’was the bloody flux got him. I was with him, but we didn’t do nuthin’ coz he couldn’t. I thought it was drink, but in the morning, I knew it warn’t. Madame, she was angry he brought the flux into the house. She wanted to throw him into the street. But she was afraid Lord Taverston would come, so she had me drug him out here.”

“He’s been sick with the flux for two weeks?” Benjamin shouted at the girl. “And no one sent for Lord Taverston?”

“He said not to! He said it warn’t the flux. And no one else got sick, not even me, and I’m the one cleaning him up coz Madame said I had to. But he said he’d get better, and he isn’t.”

She threw open the door. Crispin lay shivering in the straw. His skin was the color of thin blue-white milk. The air stank of sickness. Not gin. Not sex. Profound sickness overwhelmed even the smell of cow.

Benjamin carried Crispin back to the house.

“Don’t tell Jasper. He’ll send me home. Don’t tell him.”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

He told Jasper. The physician Jasper summoned advised against trying to travel to London or Chaumbers. Crispin was too weak. He said laudanum might help. Which Crispin fought. He’d been given it before. But he hadn’t a choice. For the next month, Benjamin nursed him. Dosed him with laudanum until the danger was passed. And then watched him suffer when the drug was withdrawn. Benjamin learned that Crispin had been a sickly child. He was desperate not to be known as a sickly young man.

Supposedly, he was doing better now. In the army. Benjamin wondered how.

The earl’s entourage entered Grosvenor Square. Jasper’s townhouse loomed large in the distance. Benjamin felt a shadow of the awe that had engulfed him the first time he saw it and understood that a friend of his actually lived in a four-story palace with a gray-stucco façade, an iron-work balcony across the second floor, and a large-porticoed entrance, all overlooking the manicured acres and acres of the garden square.

The carriages rumbled and the horses clip-clopped along the cobbles.

Benjamin thought of the letter he’d received when Crispin left school and bought his commission: “I will be proud to die for King and Country. I would not have been proud to die in a brothel’s cowshed.”

Maybe his relations with the Taverstons had always been tinged with servitude on his part and gratitude on theirs. But it had not seemed so to him during those halcyon years when they were no longer boys but not yet men. The friendship they offered had seemed genuine.

He’d known he was not their equal, but he’d learned how to ride, how to dance, how to hold his fork, when to wear gloves and when to remove them. He would never be a gentleman, but he learned how not to embarrass himself in the company of gentlemen. Callow fellow that he’d been, he almost believed he belonged in that company.

Until Olivia waved him into the billiard room. And told him she loved him. And every illusion he’d been harboring came crashing down.

It had been easy to break her young heart when she didn’t hold his in her hands. But it meant facing the fact that he was who he was. What he was. It meant leaving the cocoon of the Taverstons’ kindness to make his own way in the world.

Only to crawl back to them when he failed.

Now, he would have to bear witness to Olivia’s coming-out. Other men would woo her. One would win her. He wanted her to find happiness. He did.

But the unfairness of the world sapped his strength. Mocked his equanimity. He did not want to resent the Taverston brothers, his good friends, but feared he would. He feared he did.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Olivia decided that life was simpler when devoted to pleasing others. That was evidently her strength. When she’d tried seizing the initiative—demanding a kiss at the folly, throwing herself at Benjamin at the lakeside—she made everything worse. So now that they were all back at 8 Grosvenor Square, she would do only what was expected of her.