Page 94 of One Night with a Rake

“Good lad, Billy,” Roger told the boy as he fished in his pockets and came up with tuppence for the urchin. “There’s an extra bob waiting for you if you take my equipage to the hostlers on the next street and give old Jack a good rubdown.”

“Right-o, guv. Only I carn’t do it till the lady gets down, carn I?” The urchin pronounced Georgette’s title as if it were “li-dee.”

Roger looked back up at Georgette and any hint of geniality faded. “Now you have only one choice to make, my lady. Are you going to allow me to hand you down and walk willingly with me, or are you going to make me drag you?”

He clamped a hand on her wrist and squeezed.

“Before you decide, let me assure you that no one will come to your aid should you cry out for help. It will only give the denizens of this little pisspot of a place something to laugh about.” A muscle ticked under his left eye. “And if you force me to drag you, they may be laughing at me, which will upset me something fierce. Trust me when I tell you, milady, you do not wish to upset me.”

No one ever moved to intervene when Nathaniel carried her through Covent Garden against her will. Whitechapel folk seemed even more preoccupied with their own misery than the whores on Lackaday Lane had been.

Georgette gathered her courage and slid across the seat so he could help her down. If she could keep him calm, surely there’d be another chance to win free of him.

“I knew you’d see reason,” he said, the unpleasant smile returning. Once she was down from the gig, the street boy leaped up onto the seat and brought the reins across the gelding’s back with a wicked snap. The gig lurched away.

Roger tugged Georgette close, one arm around her waist, the other hand gripping her wrist, and led her to the red door of Sadie O’Toole’s house of ill repute. As they passed under the lintel, he put his lips close to her ear.

“Don’t be thinking anyone will come to your rescue, Georgette,” he whispered. “No one saw me enter or leave Yorkingham House. No one knows where you are or whom you are with. No one of importance even knows I lease a room here. I can keep you all to myself for days. Longer if you’re my good girl.”

“I have no intention of being your good girl.”

“Oh, I do hope you’ll reconsider,” Roger told her. “Bad girls end up dead.”

Thirty-five

Nathaniel laid the crop to the black gelding’s haunches, spurring it to more speed. The high-strung animal had been used for stately trots around Hyde Park or ceremonial occasions when the marquis was required to appear mounted. It had never been driven to its limits before, but Nate wasn’t about to spare the horse now. Every second Georgette spent with the man who’d been murdering whores and scullery maids was a second too long.

He flew through the dark streets of London. Only a blur of movement, a flash of light reflecting from the gelding’s metal bit, a spark from iron horseshoes on the cobbles, betrayed his presence. If not for the clattering sound of the horse’s hooves, anyone who saw him might mistake him for a vengeful wraith on ghostly horseback.

Nate rode as one possessed. He rode as he’d never ridden in the most furious cavalry charge, head down, leaning over the horse’s neck chanting, “Fly, damn you, fly!”

He’d failed in so many areas of his life—the way he’d dealt so poorly with Anne’s death, the miserable end to his military career, the time frittered away after that as a rake and a wastrel.

But he couldn’t fail now.

Nate would have borne losing Georgette to the royal duke, because she’d at least be safe, but he couldn’t bear losing her to Fishwick.

He loosed a terrifying war cry. The gelding laid its ears back and stretched into a careening gallop that would have left the fastest racehorse in its wake.

***

The interior of Sadie O’Toole’s place was a good deal warmer than the streets of Whitechapel, but Georgette still couldn’t stop shivering. The common room stank of cigar smoke and a stale fug of alcohol. A poque game was being played in one corner, and near the center of the room, a roulette wheel whirred, its silver spike at the center a mesmerizing blur as patrons cried out for their number and color.

Georgette tamped down her fear, looking for a way out if she could wiggle out of Roger’s iron grip. There might be an alley behind the house, but she’d have to make it through the sea of men between her and the door at the rear. Her shiver grew more pronounced and she knew it had nothing to do with cold.

A staircase on the right wall led up to a narrow balcony with doors leading off from it at intervals. Whores in various levels of dishabille, some with nipples boldly bared, leaned over the wooden banister and called out to the men to join them upstairs. Some came down and wandered among the patrons, asking the men to buy them a drink.

“Lookin’s free, guv,” one hussy said to a patron who’d fondled her. “But if ye wants to handle the merchandise, ye needs to come with me upstairs.”

“And that’s where we’re going,” Roger hissed into Georgette’s ear as he scuffled her toward the staircase.

Panic rose in the back of Georgette’s throat, a big unswallowable wad of terror. She scanned the faces of the men in the common room, hoping she might see someone she knew. Someone who might be shamed into helping her.

There was no one.

Her courage broke then. The thin veneer of self-control she’d wrapped around herself shattered. She began to scream and found she could not stop.

***