Chapter 10

A ll the way down the stairs Isabel wrote speeches worthy of any novel that she could deliver to whatever servant she saw, but in the end none were needed. Everyone in the house must be asleep.

As she slipped out through the halls, she looked through the paned glass toward the little garden in the center. She had thought there would be time for Lord Hartwick to show it to her, snowy as it was.

But there had been no time at all.

If devastating pleasure put Lord Hartwick to sleep, it acted upon Isabel like coffee. She felt completely awake, conscious of the soles of her shoes against every brick as she descended the stairs, feeling the tie between her and her beautiful man stretching so tight that it was painful but still forcing herself to walk away.

What’s done is done. Her adventure was over. He had a lord’s life to live, and she had a room in Leicester Square. They ought never to have crossed paths in the first place.

It certainly wouldn’t happen again.

Victor’s life had been a series of uneasy days and uneasy nights.

On Christmas Eve of the year 1814, he slept a long, untroubled sleep.

He woke slowly too, less hungry than usual in his belly and far more hungry for touches and smiles.

He had dreamed of clouds as soft and gentle as Isabel’s smiles and woke hungry for the touch of her skin.

Even foggy with sleep, his mind ticked over questions of the marriage contract. He wanted to provide for every day of her future, even days she might have to spend alone. He would provide money, a house, and hopefully heirs who would love their mother and grandmother and great-grandmother. The idea was intoxicating.

Generations of Hartwicks changed because he had fallen in love with a woman.

There was no question in his mind that Isabel was his match, his counterpart. Other barristers might continue to quibble over minutiae once a task was done, but once Victor settled on a correct answer, he did not waver.

Slowly it bore in upon him that his correct answer was not in the room.

He knifed upright. He’d hazily assumed she was behind the privy screen with the chamberpot, but she did not appear, moment after moment after moment.

In seconds he examined every corner of the vast chamber, its dressing room, even its clothes presses.

Isabel was not there.

In a white fury unlike anything that had ever raged through him before, Victor ripped the linen sheet from their bed and, wrapping it around his waist as a modicum of recognition of propriety, threw open the chamber door.

“What have you done with her?” he roared from the balustrade at the top of the steps, a spot that commanded the connection between all the floors. “Did you tear her out of her room? Shove her in a cold carriage on Christmas morning just to spite me? Tell me where you sent her or so help me God, I will dismiss every one of you this moment! I am the earl and I will not be gainsaid!”

Servants came running from everywhere, dashing in below wearing crooked livery and aprons that had survived the Christmas Eve revels, and down from above in nightgowns, both men and women.

Including old Mr. Cargill, wisps of white hair jutting out under his nightcap. “My lord, what has happened?”

They all looked entirely too calm. Used to the shouting of an earl of Hartwick, no doubt. That only added fuel to the fire licking upward inside Victor from the vicinity of his heart.

“Miss Snow is not here. Our guest. Not a nightbird, a good lady who will one day be—” He cut himself short. His business was none of theirs. “What have you done with her?”

Mr. Cargill still looked too calm for Victor’s tastes, but he descended the stair with the dignity of a man who usually wore faultless coats and organized everything. He addressed the little crowd of startled, murmuring servants. “Who has seen Miss Snow this morning?”

“No one, sir.” Mrs. Reed spoke for the bevy of maids, dressed and undressed, who flocked around her. “None of the girls has seen Miss Snow.”

“What about you?” Unable to restrain himself, Victor pointed an accusing finger at the lone groomsman who had doubtless been interrupted at breakfast.

“We ‘aven’t seen no one this morning, sir, an’ ‘at’s the truth.” The young man still clutched a Christmas morning apple in his hand, its white flesh showing against the red where he’d bitten it.

“Search the house,” was all Victor said and stalked back into his room. Isabel’s room.

The flurry of noise outside did not penetrate the brittle dome that seemed to settle over Victor with every step he took. He closed the door.

In silence he searched the room again as if looking would produce her. There was no logic in it; he only felt compelled to keep looking.

There was the place where she had lay next to him in the featherbed. There was a slight dip her body had left. There was a golden hair upon the cushions. He could try to keep it, but where?

And he did not want her hair. He wanted her.

There were the linens on the hearth. They were dry now. The spot where she had stood, wet, waiting for him. How long could he live on a memory?

A tiny crumble of dirt lay on the hearth to one side. Had she dunked her hems in mud? Her shoes? He imagined her brushing them off, crouching alone at his fire.

Those were the tiny moments that made a life, and he had not paid attention when they happened. He had not known she wore something wet and muddy. It couldn’t have happened at the bookshop; perhaps it had happened here, outside his house. His grounds. And he hadn’t known.

He hadn’t paid attention.

Slowly Victor sat on the edge of the bed where he had discovered Isabel, and delight, and hope all in one night.

Outside the servants still rushed about. They had no reason to lie. They were all well versed in disposing of his father’s jolly-girls, to the point of not needing to lie about escorting one from the house, even in the small hours.

Every maid and footman must have heard about Isabel’s visit; if the gossip hadn’t reached every corner of the house once she sat down at table with him, it would have once he confined Mrs. Hopp to her room. They knew to treat Isabel as a guest, not one of his father’s servicers.

Isabel had left of her own free will.

The realization launched an inward search of his mind for mistakes he had made, for faults that could have lost him the one thing that had ever been bright. There were so many more than failing to notice her muddy clothes.

Why had he not spoken more about her past, her problems? Why had he not insisted on knowing why she, an obviously eligible maiden, walked alone into bookshops in the middle of London? Not to mention travel all the way to his house.

Why had he not asked her how she had done that?

He’d thought her poor from the plainness of her clothes. But he’d met her in a bookshop. Novels came in multiple volumes and could cost ten, fifteen shillings each. Well-bound ones, over a pound. She must have the money to entertain herself if she had planned to buy herself a book, or perhaps several.

She could not have planned to bring unbound pages to his home on Christmas Eve.

It was miles to Pritchard’s bookshop from here. Her home might be farther yet. How would she get there, if not with his carriage, early on Christmas morning?

Victor was no callow youth. He was trained in the law. His barrister’s mind immediately saw evidence of a sharp swindler, probably with an accomplice, one who captured men’s attention to get inside their homes and make their theft. An accomplice could have driven her here last night, let her work her wiles upon him, then carried her away again this morning, perhaps with silver candlesticks in her hands.

But it was not possible. Isabel had no wiles. Victor was no judge of women, but he knew maneuvering when he saw it. Isabel did not maneuver.

Somehow she had been delivered to his doorstep, a Christmas miracle, and he had lost her. Because he was a selfish bumbler.

Now that he thought back with his painfully excellent memory, he could remember a thousand moments he could have done differently, and wished he had. He could have told her how lovely she was, how precious. He could have asked about her childhood or her dreams. He could have told her he wanted to wake up with her...

...every day for the rest of his life.

“Mercy help me.” Victor, who’d seen precious little mercy in his life, needed it now.

Isabel was gone, he had no idea where.

If his previous days had been bleak, they were nothing compared to the prospect of years to come without her.

“You’re not going out?” Jenny paused elbow-deep in the washtub, agape at the picture of Isabel buttoning her coat.

“I am.”

“Let me get my coat.”

“I’m going alone, Jenny.” And before the maid could object, “It’s just one of those things we agree not to tell anyone. Just like you leaving early for your Christmas Eve. We can do as we please, can’t we? As we are both of age.” Isabel’s level look said Jenny might well be asked about Isabel’s behavior, perhaps by someone at one of her father’s pubs, and that Jenny could keep such reports to herself.

It was six days since Isabel had arrived home to her empty room frozen and exhausted.

Both the glory of her adventure and the terror of being in the wrong place had dripped away through her toes with every step she took away from Victor and the warm bed in which she’d left him.

With every step panic had grown, whirling between worry that she was already with child and hope that she might be.

London was awash with people who drank her father’s ale. A baby meant that someone would find out, her parents would find out, and Isabel would be on the street.

On the other hand, that seemed a small price to pay for the magical gift of Victor’s child, a part of Victor who would stay with her always.

Both thoughts had plagued her with every step of the long, cold journey back to Leicester Square. They intruded over and over all through the morning, through Jenny’s return, through all Jenny’s stories of boisterous Christmas Eve which Isabel didn’t really hear at all.

She’d spent a feverish day planning how to present herself at the corner bakery and offer to learn how to sell or make bread.

Then her courses arrived.

Blood was inconvenient enough; now it came with mourning.

For three days she wallowed in sad contemplation that she should be glad there was no evidence of her adventure. Nothing in her room had changed, nothing about her person.

All the changes were inside. She was not the same Isabel.

Now she could say very firmly to Jenny, “I am walking to Pritchard’s bookshop. I shan’t be gone long. In a few hours when I return we’ll have dinner.”

“But I should?—”

“Didn’t you say it was bad luck not to finish all the washing on New Year’s Eve?”

“Oh yes, mum. Can’t wash a thing on New Year’s Day, you’re washing someone out of your life. Bad luck indeed. But you can’t go all that way alone!”

“I can and I will.” I’ve done it before, Isabel thought to herself, finding it impossible to explain how she had come by some of the most terrifying and magnificent experiences of her life. “If the washing isn't done when I return, we will finish it together.”

“Oh no, mum!” Jenny straightened, shocked, and soap suds dripped from her fingers into the tub. “That’s not work for you, you’re a lady!”

“I’m a brewer’s daughter and just as capable of washing linens as you.” Isabel held back from adding I’m just a woman.

She had been raised to think so hard on the differences in people’s stations. To capture a place higher than the one where she began, but only by inches. From Victor’s arms, the world had seemed much simpler, and much better.

For a few hours Isabel had been simply a person, and love paid no attention to those fine discrepancies she had been taught to honor so much.

Jenny and the washing and everything else faded from her mind as she walked down the stairs, already lost in questions that would not be answered by reading.

Had she let those teachings, all that worry about fine discrepancies, lead her away from the luck that had found her, most fortuitously, in a bookshop on Christmas Eve?

In one day’s adventure she had discovered so much that she had never known before. Not just the excitement of this house, the trappings of his title, but the warmth of his touch and his desire. She had been desired, and her desire had been returned.

She’d been alive.

On Christmas Day she’d come home to an empty room, still reeling from it all, still convinced she was right. She was no Lady Hartwick. There would never be a floor-to-ceiling portrait of dumpy, dull Isabel Snow. She could no more fit into that world than an elephant could fit a key-hole.

And she would never be a mistress, because she loved Victor Adell, the Earl of Hartwick, with all her heart.

That suspicion grew minute by minute since she’d slipped out of his bed. It had grown into a conviction, and was still growing. It was more intimate than his body inside her, yet more lonely. Something she felt by herself, but was nonetheless very real.

She loved him.

She would not be able to bear news of his marriage to a real Lady Hartwick. Isabel had never been jealous of the women who married Mr. Ball and Mr. Wheelock; indeed, in Mr. Wheelock’s case, she felt rather sorry for Mrs. Wheelock.

But the next Lady Hartwick would have not only that ancient house and all the fine things in it. She would have Victor’s company, as much as she liked. She would have his conversation, his dinners and his nights. She would have his body and likely his soul and doubtless his heart, for Victor was too honest to marry where he could not love.

Just the thought of it made Isabel burn with envy and fill with tears.

The envy was selfish, a sin, and she would one day leave it behind.

The tears were also selfish, sadness for a love found and lost too quick, and those would never leave her.

It was warmer on New Year’s Eve than it had been a week ago, and the paving stones wet with melting snow as if the world were doing all the crying Isabel could not. Her shoes constantly threatened to slip.

Still she walked toward Pritchard’s as surely as if she had been there a thousand times, not just once.

Her journey back from the Hartwick house had taken hours of wandering, full of frights and discoveries. Staying away from men, asking direction from the old lady charwomen and fruit sellers who perhaps never needed sleep, Isabel had learned many of the street names, found where they were etched fifty or eighty years ago on flat stones in the bricks above her head, easily read even in dawning winter light.

By walking south and being brave enough to ask directions to Leicester Square, she had found her way home.

She would never be nervous of venturing forth again, because while she could not have Victor Adell, she had herself. And she found that she did not care to spend her life within doors wasting all her future because her past was not what it should have been.

This new Isabel still had the bad habit of correcting others, undoubtedly rude and unwelcome, but Isabel could not fault herself for it when she had committed so many other, greater sins.

Walking along Piccadilly’s pavement, she shook her head in admonishment at a stringy boy teasing his sister by holding her rag doll high above her head.

She felt some satisfaction, at least, when he looked somewhat abashed and returned it.

Enough satisfaction to smile just a little, lost in her thoughts, until brought back to earth by nearly colliding with two men arguing nose-to-nose on the pavement right in front of her.

Old Isabel was of course alarmed. Old Isabel was still in her; she could not change that much in the span of a week.

But new Isabel was not so easily scared away. What was the worst that could happen? Being accosted by a ruffian in a bookshop? Leaving the love of her life?

So she studied both men, one in a fine coat and beaver hat and waving a driving whip, the other stocky, his coarse fustian jacket sprinkled with flour.

“No,” said Isabel.

Both men stopped, surprised at the interruption.

Isabel took advantage of their attention to say what she thought. “This is not the place to display your bad temper. The rest of us do not need our day ruined by witnessing violence.”

Taken aback, the man in the fine hat was used to talking. “This boil-crusted assailant nearly killed me! Ran his cartwheel into my brougham!”

The miller was slower to speech but more colorfully spoken. “This whey-faced goat-roller is dicked in t’ nob! Y’ can’t drive wherever y’ please whenever y’ like! Turnt right into me he did!”

Isabel peeked around them both. The vehicles in question stood in the street, blocking the flow of carts and horses, causing many other people to swear just as colorfully as they passed.

Asked the miller, “You were turning on this street?”

“Eagle Street, aye, got a delivery.” He jerked his thumb toward his cart, laden with sacks.

She looked up at the man in the beaver hat. He was tall, but not as tall as Victor. “And you did too?”

“Tried to.” Past her shoulder, he shook his whip-bearing fist at the miller. “I’ll write out a complaint on you today! I have a good solicitor, I’ll have you know!”

“I’m sure you have.” Isabel still itched to know more about solicitors, barristers, magistrates. Perhaps one day she would. “Did you let him finish the turn before you started?”

“He should have made way!”

“No. How would he know you wished to turn as well? Should he divine it by the way you wear your hat? Imagine if every cart-driver had to guess that others would turn into their path. No one would ever get anywhere.”

“‘At’s right, miss!” the miller shouted in her support.

Isabel held out a quelling hand. “No need to shout.”

“I’ll show you shouting, you interfering wench! Look at his wagon, not a scratch, and look at the side of my brougham! I demand satisfaction and I will get it.” He raised his whip-bearing fist. “Now you mind your own affairs and shove?—”

Suddenly the man blanched as pale as the snow.

“Never mind,” he muttered and clambered, all whip and limbs, into his brougham as fast as he could go.

The miller stared, open-mouthed, and started to shout something after him; then he too looked Isabel’s way. He winced. “Bye,” was all he said as he climbed up on the seat of his cart and tch-tched to the mule to start him rolling.

Isabel wondered for a long second when she had become so frightening.

Then she whirled.

Victor Adell stood behind her, the Earl of Hartwick, all raven-black clothes and glower, the glower fading as she stared, speechless, up into his precious face.

Everything about it transformed. His mouth softened, his remarkable eyes lightened, and he said just as crisply as he said everything, “Madame, I require your help. I have misplaced my wife.”