11. Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven

‘And I don’t understand why he can’t give him some space. What is it with men and their sons? After Johannes left in a huff—a quiet one, because, Johannes , I went down to the kitchen and then to the desk, and you won’t believe what Pierre had to deal with from some uppity countess from up north…’

Once upon a time, Phineas’s days had been spent in silence.

He’d eaten breakfast in silence.

He’d walked to the bank in silence.

He’d scribbled in ledgers, ruled columns, and discussed fiscal questions in hushed whispers. Even his conversations with Taylor about fraud and financial mismanagement had been carried out with a quiet temperance.

But now? There was nothing quiet, nor temperate, nor peaceful about his afternoon walks escorting Rosanna from the hotel back to Honeysuckle Street.

‘And after that, well, Father came down, and he was livid—told Pierre that no one would speak to his staff that way. The pair of them settled their accounts and grumbled something like they preferred the Langham anyway, which is ridiculous because everyone knew it wasn’t true. No one voluntarily leaves the Aster early.’

Ever since that afternoon when they’d overheard Pennington’s man suggest that Lord Richard kidnap her, she’d started taking his elbow as they walked. She talked, incessantly. About staff and their grievances, arguments, problems with guests, her favourite colours, new boots she was thinking about purchasing, whether she had enough ink to finish all her correspondence… Anything that came to her mind almost immediately found voice on her lips. Around Trafalgar Square, she finally drew a breath. A little further along, by the river, another. And, as they moved into the dappled shadows beneath the cherry blossoms in the park near Honeysuckle Street, she paused for the third time.

‘It is possible to walk without talking,’ Phineas said, compacting his words so that they fit into the small wedge of quiet.

Rosanna tightened her hold on him. ‘You hardly say a word. If I didn’t talk, we’d be walking in silence.’

‘What an incredible thought. Let’s give it a try.’

She rolled her eyes and her lips, but perhaps sensing a competition, she held her tongue. For three glorious steps, the only sound between them was the rustle of her skirt and the crunch of his heels on the gravel path. For three glorious steps, there was nothing but the robins and the breeze and the grey clouds, nothing but the scent of roses and sunshine. Her delicate fingers pressing into his bicep. The brush of her body against his.

‘I’ve made up my mind about something,’ she announced.

‘What dress to wear tomorrow?’ Phineas drawled. ‘Or that you need new gloves?’

‘I want you to bed me.’

Phineas stumbled over an uneven edge of the path. ‘You are not obligated to. This isn’t a real marriage.’

‘But everyone believes it is. The other day, Mrs Redgrave spoke about marital duties, and all the counting involved, and I felt like a fool because I was supposed to know what she meant, and I didn’t. I was so flustered.’ Rosanna stopped, and with a slight tug, pulled him to face her. ‘If you aren’t very good, I won’t mind. It will give me something to complain about.’

‘Books,’ he declared. ‘I have books on this subject in the library. You can look at them.’

‘I’ve read books,’ she said, exasperated. ‘Those women will know I am fibbing if I keep stammering like I do now.’ She threaded her fingers through his. Thus caught, he let her pull him a little closer. ‘You really must be terrible.’

‘I’m not terrible at it. I’m actually very good.’

‘Prove it,’ she said.

He tried to step back, but she held him firmly in place. Eye to eye, toe to toe, her spring green gaze met his, and her crisp confidence hovered like the beckoning point on an unattainable horizon. A fool, he was a damn fool. As he slid a hand around her waist and drew her close, he knew he was walking a tightrope. He tried to think of some throwaway line, some provocation, but in the quiet invitation of her gaze, he lost all comprehension of language. One kiss would show her he was not terrible . Then he would send her to the library to learn more.

He grazed her lips. Light. Soft. Just enough to feel the heat of her mouth and a wink of desire. A singular sigh of connection. A long, tilted moment of quiet yearning, and while he longed to press more, taste more, and feel more, he instead nipped her bottom lip and pulled back. But before he could mutter, I told you I was not terrible , Rosanna slapped her palms flat against his cheeks, fixed him in place, and planted her lips rudely against his. Luxurious, luscious softness. He considered fighting, but why? What a sweet relenting, what a delicious experience of silence . He chased her sweetness, then dared to seek out her tongue with his own. The lovely swell of her breasts pressed against his chest, and he hitched her closer so that he could kiss a little deeper. Beyond divine. She sought him, tentatively flicking her tongue against his own before she seemed to decide she liked the sensation and fully parted her lips. She was all acceleration, moving from modest to tempest in the time it took him to take a little gasp of air before surrendering to her again.

He could lose himself in her. He was losing himself. He was drowning. She sighed against him as she threaded her fingers through his hair.

Phineas dredged up his resolve, squeezed her hips, then pushed her away so hard she stumbled. She blinked fast, her brow knitting in confusion.

‘That shouldn’t have happened. I told you already—’

‘You’re not interested,’ she snapped. ‘I remember.’

He’d almost forgotten the throwaway line on their first night, spoken after too much whisky and not enough brooding. He’d searched for words of comfort and safety then, but instead blurted out a cross between an excuse and a jibe.

‘I’ll walk ahead,’ Rosanna said, already on her way. ‘You can follow. Then you can have your peace and quiet.’

Phineas retreated to one of the remaining uninhabited rooms on the fourth floor. He would have gone to the fifth, to put as much distance between himself and his wife as he could, but he didn’t want to risk running into the lady’s maid or the house mistress or whoever occupied the rooms at the opposite end of the corridor on the topmost level.

On the way, he met Felix on the stairs.

‘Bit far from your quarters,’ Phineas said.

Felix ground to a halt. ‘I was… I was checking the linens. In the store cupboard.’ He turned to point.

‘And?’

‘We have many types. At least three different blends. All lovely.’ Felix crossed to the other end of the stair, then descended a few steps. ‘Are you staying home instead of going to your club? I can send something up if you aren’t dining with Mrs Babbage.’

‘Yes. And whisky.’

‘Problem, sir,’ Felix replied. ’You tipped it all out. Remember?’

Blast it. ‘Soda. With syrup. The one Viscountess Dalton sends over. And toast. With unspoilt jam.’

Phineas trudged the last few stairs to the landing before he clicked the lock on the door open. Once inside the fourth-floor front bedroom—the one with the coveted extra windows—he half closed the door and readied his key. Then he stopped. It was a ridiculous habit, keeping these rooms locked. It had seemed essential when he’d first moved into the townhouse, in a city where he knew not a soul and trusted even fewer people. That was before he’d hired Felix. He’d been caught in a flurry of sleepless anxiety, then. He’d spent his days wandering between the rooms in the front corner of the townhouse, peering through their windows into the park, watching out for a sign that he’d been followed, and waiting for Pennington and his men to find him. All the while he’d wracked his memory for some hint of what might have happened to Imogen. A desk in the corner, high with loose leaf, scraps of paper, and dust, was a pathetic relic to his failures. He’d promised to keep her safe. He’d failed.

He’d known he’d failed for so long, and yet he’d stayed. Stayed on this street with its mishmash of neighbours who fought and loved and asked each other for help. It had all started with damn Petunia Hartright, who’d convinced him to join her choir. Saying no would have been rude, and two sentences into his first conversation with her, he’d known she’d be a persistent woman. Part of his cover, he’d told himself, essential to blending in. He’d made every excuse to no one but himself, and like a fool, he’d believed his own lies. Helping Iris, helping Arley, feeding that cat… The mess of them had drawn him in, as if he might be able to line them up like numbers in a tally, wrest with the equations of their problems, and set them straight into a solution.

If he hadn’t stumbled upon Rosanna, if he hadn’t fashioned himself into her saviour, would he have left?

Or would he have skulked the street and found some other reason to stay, some other cause, as he had done so many times before? For seven ridiculous years.

Night chased his brooding. The park turned silver as the greens desaturated to grey. A light scratch sounded at the door. ‘Phineas?’

‘Mmm?’ he hummed, forcing himself to stay focused on the world outside.

‘Why won’t you bed me?’

Because I don’t deserve you. I will only taint you. I will darken your light. And I fear one breath of you, and you will become my oxygen.

Every sense, every nerve in his body, every fizzle of energy under his skin told him not to turn, but still, he did. He sat forwards in his old armchair, in its puddle of moonlight, to regard his wife. Framed by the doorway, she wore a dressing gown of practical, warm flannel, tied at the waist but still revealing a white triangle of nightgown. She held a flickering candle stub before her, and its light danced across her cheeks, her full rose lips. It placed a delicate glimmer in her eyes, eyes that had seen so little, that were so innocent and so warm, so ready to see the potency of the world, of life. The spoilt little rich girl who was selfish and self-flattering… Yet, somewhere amongst all that self-assuredness, she could also be kind and find joy in a raincloud and forever in a sunbeam.

‘You know why,’ he grumbled. ‘This is not a real marriage.’

‘I know you will leave.’ She crossed the room with barely a huff of slipper on the carpet. She paid attention. Even through all that prattling, she listened. ‘It will be years before I can marry, if ever. How can I trust any man? Might I be independent for a short time?’

‘And fucking makes you independent?’ He meant it to sound crass, a barb, and from the way she flinched, she took it as one. ‘I won’t leave you with a child.’

‘There are other things, aren’t there? That a man and a woman might do? I am not completely na?ve. If you are to make me a widow or an abandoned wife, I’d like to not be a fool. And I would like to think that I was not so hideous to you as to be unbedable.’

‘That’s not a word,’ he said.

‘It is now.’ She lifted a handful of gown and swung one leg over his thigh to straddle his lap. The candlelight jiggered with the movement before stilling. She settled against him, her knees resting on the chair seat until the inside of her thighs ran the length of the outside of his. The faintest hint of her scent—woman, roses, and sex—tinged the air.

Phineas breathed slowly, as if he could taste her fragrance on his tongue. ‘You are too brash, Hempel. It will do you no favours. This is not a world that rewards confident women.’ He ran a finger along the soft angle of her nape and stroked the dip at the base of her neck. ‘You would be best served to be more demure. And less curious.’ And he kissed the hollow, slow and measured and indulgent, like he had not been dreaming of the taste of her skin for days, like the thought had just occurred to him. She was sweetness and tang, like strawberries warmed by the sun.

She exhaled into him, her tension almost palpable as it rippled from her body into his, rolling through him and settling there before evaporating.

‘Show me the candle,’ he said as he leant back.

She frowned a little as she raised it into the space between them. Its amber luminescence made her skin shine. Her eyes glimmered almost black in the shadows, and her lips glowed copper, which meant they were blood red and ripe.

‘Blow it out,’ he said.

‘You don’t want to look at me?’ she asked. Beneath all that bravado, how could she be so fragile?

‘More than anything.’ He trailed a finger along her bottom lip. ‘If this were for me, I would turn up every lamp and light every flame, even burn the house down if it meant I could see you with perfect clarity. I would strip you and spread you and feast on you with my eyes and my mouth.’ He kissed her shoulder, then nipped her gently with his teeth. ‘But this isn’t for me, it’s for you. And I work better in the dark. So quit arguing with me and blow the damn candle out.’