Page 49 of One Night with a Rake

“That’s fine, milady. I’m happy to help,” Reuben said, hooking a finger under his collar as if his cravat had been done up too tight. “Only, I’m thinking you’ll have to explain what I’m doing here at the House of Sirens to Mercy, too. And she might not be as understanding as Mr. Humphrey.”

Nineteen

“Since she didn’t fight back, do you think Vesta knew her attacker?” Georgette asked once they were safely shut into her father’s waiting carriage.

Nathaniel pushed the velvet curtains aside so he could sweep the dark streets with his gaze. “I doubt she even saw her attacker.”

Georgette scrunched the fabric of her skirt in her fingers. It would wrinkle abominably, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. She’d never known anyone who was done to death before, and twisting the muslin helped keep the rising panic at bay. “That makes it worse somehow. She had no idea why she was being murdered.”

“Trust me, if someone is trying to snuff the life out of you, ‘why’ isn’t the first thing you think.”

She cast him a sidelong glance, but the coach was too dark to make out his expression. “I’ve never asked about your time in the military—”

“Don’t spoil your record now.”

She clamped her lips shut. He’d been so calm, so matter-of-fact in the face of a senseless death, she could only surmise it was due to the fact that he’d already seen his share of lifeless bodies. If he didn’t want to talk about it, she’d be doing him no favors to press the issue.

On the surface, Nate seemed the same as ever. She recognized the boy he’d been in the man before her. Yet surely such familiarity with death changed a person. She wondered how it had changed him.

When Anne died, there’d been no wake, no open coffin. Everyone was too concerned about the contagion spreading, so she had been quietly interred in the family crypt without much ceremony. Even now, it was hard for Georgette to imagine her lively sister dead, since she’d been recovering from the same fever at the time and she had never seen the body. Anne was simply there one day and gone the next.

One taken and one left.

She gave a quick inward shudder and decided to change the topic to something less morbid.

“I think I should ask my father to buy a secondhand carriage for me,” she announced. “For choice, something with peeling paint and a swaybacked nag to pull it.”

“In God’s name, why?”

“Don’t you see? That way when we go back to Covent Garden, we won’t stand out so much.”

“I’m thinking you shouldn’t go back there at all.”

“But you know I will.”

He sighed deeply. “Even if you have the meanest conveyance in all Christendom, you’ll still stand out on Lackaday Lane. You’d have to come here in rags and on foot in order to blend in.” He shifted on the seat beside her. “Why are you fretting about coaches right now?”

“Because it’s better than thinking about dead girls.” Morbid or not, she couldn’t order her mind to leave the image of Vesta laid out on the table.

“You have me there.”

“It seems such a waste,” she said. “Vesta had her whole life before her.”

“None of us are promised tomorrow.”

“I wonder what her hopes were,” Georgette said. “Being a shop girl for a florist doesn’t seem like much.”

“Not to the daughter of a marquis, I’m sure,” he said. “But if one has pride in what they do, it doesn’t have to seem like much to others.”

“You’re very philosophical all of a sudden.”

They were sitting side by side on the squab, close enough that she felt his shoulder lift in a shrug.

“No. Just practical. Vesta was playing the hand dealt her the best she could. It’s not her fault the cards weren’t very good to begin with.”

“It sounds as if you believe in fate.”

“No, we all make our choices and have to live by them,” he said, his tone sounding unspeakably weary. “Some just have better things to choose from than others.”