Chapter One

16th of January, 1829

Shortly before midnight

Nearly midnight, now. Rafe Beaumont lingered in the darkness that wreathed the quiet street in Marylebone, his cold hands shoved into his pockets and his gaze upon the grand house that sprawled out like a large and lazy cat, rising above the line of bare trees shading the walk. Only seven minutes left before a new day would begin. He hadn't seen the telltale light of a lamp through the drawn curtains just yet, but he knew he would. This year was the latest she'd ever been, the closest to midnight it had ever come without sign of her.

The house was silent and dark; almost eerie in its quiet, given the madhouse that he knew the place must be in the daylight hours. His breath frosted the air in a misty puff of white, and he turned up the collar of his coat against the chill. At least it hadn't rained today, as it had on this day last year. An umbrella made a man ever so much more conspicuous, and so he'd stood his interminable vigil in the thick of the freezing rain and had ended up with a wretched case of pneumonia for his troubles.

There. The sudden glow of a lamp there in the far corner of the house, glittering intermittently between the spindly, naked branches of trees as it moved past window after window, toward the sitting room she favored. Her presence revealed at last, within a quiet room far removed from the chaos that comprised the rest of the house. Probably it was one of the few places that she could slip away for a bit of privacy, some necessary silence to sit and think.

As she did now. Probably she did often, though he wasn't fool enough to come frequently enough to make a certain judgment of it. Just this night. This one night.

It had become a tradition at this juncture—though she couldn't know it—which he observed on those years in which he found himself in London. His tradition, in point of fact, to quietly pay his respects to the woman whose life he had ruined. A sort of penance he had long observed, to share the darkness with her in just a few moments of quiet contemplation for what had been lost. All that he had stolen from her.

The light creeping through the drawn curtains revealed the silhouette of a man who had come to join her. Chris, he was certain. Chris, at least, had the right to join her there as they waited for the moment to arrive. A ritual all their own, and one upon which he could never intrude.

Rafe dug his watch once more from his pocket and turned the glass face to the scant moonlight just in time to watch the minute hand tick over as the day began anew. Midnight at last. January the seventeenth.

Ten years to the day since Lady Emmeline Prescott—Emma—had become a widow. Since he had made her a widow.

And she didn't even know it.

She didn't even know he existed.

∞∞∞

"My lady?"

Emma rose from the large armchair in which she had settled only moments ago with a glass of brandy. "Neil," she said, setting her glass aside upon the table near her chair. "It's near to midnight. You ought to have retired hours ago." It carried an inflection of mild rebuke, but then Neil had always been something more than just a butler to her.

"Don't be a scold, Em. ‘E ‘ad to be up to let me in." The unrefined speech seared her ears just as Kit stepped into the room, waving Neil away. "And don't fuss, neither," he said. "I came ‘round the back."

"You didn't have to keep my butler up to do it." She ought to have expected him. He had come every year on this day for a decade now. But she had always thought that he considered it an obligation to which he tended out of duty alone. He had never wanted to be close, in the way that siblings might be.

She rather suspected that, were he ever to claim a connection with her publicly, he would be certain to stress the half siblings they were. But neither of them had had much love for their shared father to begin with, so she supposed she could not blame him for his refusal to acknowledge the connection.

"I'll let m'self out," Kit said to Neil, thrusting his gloved hand through his thick gold hair as he collapsed into the chair beside Emma's. "Won't even make off wiv the silver."

Emma hid a reluctant smile behind her glass as she nodded to Neil, who silently quit the room. Probably Kit would steal a spoon or two just to be contrary. But she had more than enough silver and wouldn't note the loss. "You're dropping your aitches again," she said. "Sometimes I think you do it only to irritate me."

"Ain't my fault they go wanderin' off sometimes," Kit said, with a gesture toward the decanter of brandy that sat upon the table. "Pour me a glass, Em." And then, "Looks like your boy's all grown up."

"Neil? Yes, well, it's been almost ten years." He'd been the very first boy that Kit had brought to her, years ago, only a few months after she'd lost Ambrose. When her house had been so big, so empty, and so damned silent. When she had wandered through halls that had echoed with her grief. When she had waded through the very thick of it, like slogging through the murky waters of the Thames. So cold. Cold and silent as a grave.

She might have made the whole of the house into a mausoleum for herself and buried herself within it, if Kit had not appeared that night, holding a scrawny little boy by the collar of his shirt. The first boy. The very first one.

A pickpocket, he'd said, employed by some kidsman or other, who'd tried clumsily to lift his pocket watch. Kit hadn't wanted to turn the boy loose upon the streets, or to send him home to his employer with nothing to show for the day's labors.

She could well remember the jut of the Neil's ribs through his sallow skin, the dirt and grime that had caked him. She had wondered, just briefly, if the child might have been Kit's get. If he had intended to foist the child off upon her to be rid of him himself.

But no—Kit had truly believed himself to be doing her some sort of favor. And he had thrust the child in her direction, eyes averted, as he had said in that appalling underclass accent, "Couldn't have none o' yer own, aye, Em? Then take this ‘un." And then he had taken himself off, content to leave the child in her care.

And she had taken Neil in. Because her heart had wrenched for the half-starved child, who had looked so fearful, so anxious. Because Kit had brought him to her, and she suspected that he had done it because he knew something of Neil's situation himself. She had thought to have him bathed and fed, to let him sleep in a comfortable bed for an evening, and then to send him on his way in the morning with a few coins. At least enough to buy his way back into his gang.

Only, once Neil had been bathed and fed, he'd recovered a more amiable disposition. And Emma had found herself diverted from the quiet, from the cold, from the emptiness that shadowed her every waking moment. A tiny thought had hovered within her mind, which she had tried to chase to the far reaches, certain that it wouldn't matter. Certain that although she had tucked the boy into a bed, he would no doubt escape in the night and be gone come morning.

But he hadn't. He hadn't found a convenient window to let himself out of, or made off with as much silver as he could carry. He had been awake with the sun, waiting for her in the kitchens when she had at last roused herself, and they had…considered one another. And that thought—the one she had tried to shove away—had come back to the forefront of her mind.

She had offered him an education. A home. Good food to eat, books to read, and most importantly, safety. So long as he gave up the thievery and applied himself to his studies. And Neil—older than she had first expected, but so stunted from lack of nutrition that she had thought him much younger—had accepted.

Suddenly, her house had not been empty. And over time she had collected more of them, those children who desperately needed a way out of a bad situation, children whose parents could no longer afford to feed or clothe them. Kit still brought them, occasionally, whenever he found a child in need. But Neil had been the very first. The one whose presence had saved her from her loneliness.

He was with her still. Too young, really, to be a butler. But he had learned from the best, and when she had pensioned off her former butler a few years ago, Neil had stepped ably into the role. One which he took quite seriously, far more so than his age—which she had placed around two and twenty now—would suggest.

There had been so many children since. A hundred at least, and her home had never again languished in that queer silence, that yawning, churning emptiness. Except for one January night each year.

Kit accepted the glass of brandy she extended to him, letting it dangle from his fingers as he lounged in his chair, stretching out his long legs. Strange, she thought, how closely he resembled their father. The same severe slant to his brows, the same sharp, cutting chin. The same gold hair and glacial blue eyes. He was just two or three years her senior; the product of a liaison between their father and a housemaid whom Father had turned out the moment he had learned she was expecting.

Father had had little interest in his baseborn son, except as a cudgel to wield against Emma's mother—his lawful wife—who had failed to give him the legitimate son he had desired. And Emma had grown up always knowing that she, his only legitimate child, had fallen far short of expectations.

She would have dearly liked to have a brother. Even half of one, though she had long been aware that Kit thought their blood connection to be tenuous at best. One that thrived only beneath cover of darkness, for perhaps two or three evenings a year. Whenever he had a child to deliver to her, or—tonight. This night.

In silence they watched the clock tick through its motions, the hour drawing inexorably closer to midnight. In the early years, when the grief had still been fresh, often she had cried. Kit hadn't comforted her, per se—he was not a man who had much experience with or patience for the task of providing comfort—but still he had sat with her, weathering her grief with stalwart forbearance. The closest to a brotherly affection of which he was capable.

Midnight arrived unceremoniously, without pomp or pretension. Another year gone in the blink of an eye, swallowed into the silence like so many other things. The last, dying gasp of dreams that had been skewered years and years ago. Along with the girl who had once dreamt them.

"There," Kit said, in a bland voice. "It's done. Ten years now, aye?"

"Yes." A decade now, Emma had been a widow. More than thrice the time in which she had been a wife. "Ten years."

"‘E wasn't a good ‘usband to ye, Em."

No, but he hadn't been a bad one either, per se—not that Kit had any reason to know otherwise. If Ambrose had had a mistress during their marriage, at least he had been suitably discreet in it. And he had never chided her for her failure to give him a child, though they both knew that the fault was her own, since he confessed to fathering an illegitimate child years before they had wed. But he hadn't loved her, either. At least, not in the way that she had loved him, with all of the affection stored up from her youth that had had no other place to go, nowhere else to settle. She had poured every ounce of it out upon him, desperately in love with the very idea of love, of having someone of her own to love her in return. And Ambrose—

Had been fond of her. Like one might value a possession. But he had never loved her. That had been the greatest of all of her failures; that in the three years of their marriage she had never earned more than his absent affection.

With nervous fingers she smoothed at the silk folds of her lavender gown. Half-mourning, still, after all these years. Her wardrobe had remained a study in monochromatic heartache. Enough. Just—enough.

Restive and tense, she drained the last of her brandy, tasting nothing more than the burn as it coated the back of her tongue on its way down her throat. "I've begun clearing out his things from his study," she said as she rose to her feet once more.

"Good." It was a sour grunt. "‘E didn't deserve a shrine."

Something of a laugh tangled in her throat. "It wasn't a shrine," she said defensively. "It was—it was his haven." The place where he had spent the majority of his time, locked away from her. From everyone, really, but her most of all. There had been more of him left within it than there had been in the bedchamber adjoining her own, the one which he had occupied and had never welcomed her intrusion within.

"Get rid of the lot of it," Kit suggested, his gold brows slashing over his eyes. "The bastard's ‘aunted yer ‘ouse long enough. Ye don't need it, Em, any of it."

But the house had been his long before it had been hers, and for years she had not felt she had the right to disturb his private places. "Of course, I returned most of his personal effects to his family years ago, the heirlooms and such." Since she had never been able to given him a child to whom she might have passed them down, and they rightfully belonged to the family from which they had come. "But I've found a few things just lately I thought I ought to keep. Things with sentimental value only to me. His pocket watch"—which she had given to him on the occasion of their first wedding anniversary, and which he had said was too fine to ever take outside of the house—"and his favorite pipe. His—his journal."

Kit's brows lifted in interest, dark gold spiking in a magnificent arch toward his hairline. "‘Is journal? Never would have thought ‘im the sort. What's in it?"

Emma lifted her shoulders in a jerky shrug. "I've no idea. I can't bring myself to read it." She had found it only yesterday, wedged behind a thick stack of law books on a shelf within his study, but she had only allowed herself to crack the spine enough to peek at Ambrose's elegant script therein before she had slammed it shut once again.

She hadn't been able to force herself to read what he had written within, the private thoughts he never would have shared with her. She had spent ten years, now, mourning him. What a blow it would have been had she read it only to discover how little he truly had thought of her. Whether his affections might have been engaged elsewhere. Whether he might have had a mistress he had truly loved, in a way he had never loved her.

Perhaps someday she would drum up the courage. But even if Ambrose was long gone from this earth, still he existed as an open wound upon her heart. One that would have to heal before she could bear to read the words he had left behind.

A chill swept over her skin, and Emma busked the chill bumps from her arms. She'd strayed too far from the hearth, and the heat did not extend so far. The window toward which she had wandered, even guarded by curtains, did not quite keep out the bite of the January air. "I have an…indelicate question for you," she said.

"Indelicate questions beget indelicate answers," Kit said dryly.

"Perhaps, but I've no one else to ask." At least, no one that had the potential to assist her like he could. But Kit—Kit led a different sort of life than most of those of her acquaintance. He occupied some nebulous space within the seedier echelon of society, and it was those connections she would prevail upon now. "I've been thinking, just recently, of acquiring a—a paramour."

"Jesus Christ." The heels of his boots scraped across the carpet as he slouched still further, and he rubbed at his eyes as if he'd acquired a sudden headache. "What's that got to do wiv me? It ain't hard, Em, to find a man to do it. Ye just find a toff ye like, bat yer lashes a bit, and fuck ‘im."

Her ears burned at the crude word. "It's not so simple as that."

"As a man, I'm tellin' ye it is."

Not when the only men she knew were of her own social set. Men inclined to gossip every bit as much as the ladies. Men who would think nothing of tearing a woman's reputation to shreds just because they could. And men, who, crucially, might wield an advantage against a vulnerable widow who commanded a not-insignificant fortune.

"I can't," she said. "I can't. Not with—with anyone I know." Not with a man she might encounter at Ton events, whose circumspection might be in question. She couldn't lie with another woman's husband, and neither could she lie with an unattached man, who might decide a wealthy bride—even one long widowed—would suit him well enough. She had too much to lose to risk such a thing. "A man of my social set might expect marriage."

"Then marry the blighter afore ye fuck ‘im."

"Don't be so crass, Kit, I beg you." Emma steeled her shoulders. "I have no intention of marrying again." She could not stomach another marriage in which her affection was the greater. It killed a soul by inches to give everything of love, and have only the scraps of it in return. "I had hoped you might know of—of someone suitable. Surely you're aware of brothels and the like."

"Sure. Mostly filthy places, overrun with disease. That ‘ow ye want to go out, Em? Riddled with the pox?"

She cringed from the statement. "Naturally, I would prefer a gentleman not afflicted by such ailments."

"Naturally," Kit echoed snidely, in a perfect mimicry of her upper class accent. "And while we're at it, I s'pose you'd prefer an ‘andsome gent. Charming. Genteel."

Of course she would prefer those things. It would make it seem less unsavory.

"I s'pose I'd just direct him ‘round the back?" Kit shoved himself to his feet, pacing toward her. "Same way I come?"

She had never asked him to. "Don't be ridiculous. It's a quiet street. There's no one—" She flicked back the curtains, peering out into the dim night. Odd. There was someone. One solitary figure mostly concealed in the shadows at the end of the street. A man, she was certain of it. But it was too dark to make out any of his features.

Kit had come up behind her, staring through the frost-misted panes. "No one, eh?" It was meant as a scoff, but it fell quite flat. In the same moment, the lone figure in the distance began to retreat, one slow step at a time, toward the corner. In a moment the man had disappeared round the corner, and the street was quiet and vacant once again.

"Usually there isn't," she said.

A beat of silence, so thick she might have sliced it with a knife. At last he asked, "Why?"

And really, there were so many answers to that question. Because she had buried herself along with Ambrose. Because she had gone around in a half-haze for too many years already. Because she had felt just as dead as her late husband, rotting where she stood. More ghost than woman.

"Because I want to feel—" she said, and the words halted abruptly.

"Feel what?"

"Just to feel." Anything. A touch. A kiss. Something that would rouse her from the stupor she had lived within these past years. Something that might stand a prayer of relieving the agony of always having been the one to love more. Perhaps the very absence of love would do it. Like a curse she had placed upon herself. "Just to feel." Turning from the window, she scrubbed at her face with her hands. "Don't poke fun at me, Kit, I beg you. If you can't help me—"

"Don't believe I said as much, now, did I?" Though she'd let the curtains fall once again, still he stared in the direction of the window, as if his piercing gaze could see straight through even the shield of them. "As it ‘appens, I might know just the man."