Page 76 of Hazard a Guest
“Yes!” She pressed her lips together, knowing that laughter would not help this situation, and forced her attention back to her lap. “But I digress.”
There was a beat of silence, a rustle of Mr. Woodville’s note, a clearing of his throat. She allowed it to indicate that she could move onto her next subject.
“Next, I think it is time we speak plainly about the Forge and her debts and my husband too. It’s hard to know how to orient the things I want to say, what goes first, what belays which. I only ask that you bear with me. Do you agree?” She spoke quickly and looked up only after the question had ended.
He nodded. Careful. Quick. He gripped the letter from Woodville between the pads of his scarred fingers.
“First, I wish to apologize to you,” she began, holding up a hand when his mouth fell open. “I remember you, that day at the door, when we were both still but in our adolescence. I should not have turned you away. I should not have closed the door. I was in pain, and in my pain, I could not fathom yours. I was wrong. I am sorry.”
She let herself smile a little now, a sad sort of smile with no gloating or victory. “I didn’t know about you, but I believe the story you told. I think you and I were the same to the late Mr.Withers, you see. We were both raw talent that he could refine and shape. It was just easier to buy me outright. I think we can both see that neither of us truly had it better, only different.
“If he’d lived, you would have become his protégé too, maybe even his successor, but you would have been his subordinate just like I was. We were never his equals.
“I respect that you loved the Forge—the Sparrow’s Tail, Mr. Beck. I respect that you never gave up on her. In your place, I would not have either.”
She paused, sucking in another deep breath. She steadied herself in the smell of the lilies. It was not so cloying now, she thought, now that she was seated alongside it, now that she was letting it deepen. It was steadying, she thought, still sweet but not dishonest.
“You were the one who got to inherit it,” he told her, his voice soft this time but not with the venomous velvet of his careful control. It was soft in earnest. Quiet. He was listening.
“I was not written into the will in a clear way,” she said, blinking up at him, still towering even while seated. “His children hated me. They gave me the most worthless thing they could find without breaking the law. If they’d honored me as his wife, if they’d cared for what he actually wished, they would have given me something better and you would have been able to buy your treasure.”
She gave him a sardonic little shake of the head. “Mr. Withers did not expect to die. Men never do. It was his hubris that damned us both.”
“His children …” Beck began, flinching at even the thought of beginning this topic.
“I know,” she said immediately, pushing him back from that precipice before he could fall over it. “I know you went to them. I know you bought debt slips from them. I don’t know what they told you, other than that they lied. Mr. Beck, I think that if you didn’t hate me so keenly, if you didn’t see me as a villainess, you would have seen right through it.”
“Seen through it?”
She nodded. He paralyzed her, and evidently she sent him into echoing mimicry. She understood.
“You know that the eldest son is in jail now, yes? For all manner of financial crime? You know they have squandered it all? They are penniless.”
She could see from the way he watched her, from the way he stared, that he did not know that. He didn’t know it was even possible.
“They sold you forgeries,” she said gently. “I have here, borrowed only for an hour, one of my true slips and one of the fakes. If you look at them side by side, you will see they are not the same.”
He released a little gust of breath, glancing at the slips she produced in her lap and then up at her face. “You know I can’t see them well enough.”
“Oh.” She blinked, realizing he was right. “Oh, yes. I didn’t, of course, but yes, that makes sense, doesn’t it?”
He shook his head, pressing the heels of his hands over his eyes and running them up over his heavy brow, and he took in several deep draws of floral air before dropping them again. “So, MissDonnelly,” he said, sounding utterly resigned. “What will you do now?”
“I will advise you to pull your escrow before anyone notices,” she said, putting the slips back in their pocket. “Else you might lose everything you’ve built.”
He laughed, a humorless, bone-dry laugh. “I’ve lost a great deal already,” he pointed out, directing his finger at the folio. “Thousands of pounds.”
She nodded. “I’m already taking steps to seek recompense for those who were defrauded by my … my … oh,” she cut herself off, shaking her head. “Don’t make me call them my stepchildren.”
“Your enemies?” he suggested with a quirk of his lips.
“My lessers,” she decided, considering him. “Ourlessers. Beck, how could you trust them? You’re not of that world. You know how they see the likes of us. Don’t you? Mustn’t you?”
“I …” He looked truly unsettled, scratching at his jaw, leaning backward like he wanted to topple into the flowers. “I thought they were like him. Like their father?”
“Oh.” She frowned. “They aren’t.”
He sighed. “I suppose I’m not like mine either.”
