Page 13 of Undercover with the Heiress
Rosanna floundered to find her footing and stumbled, bumping hard against the door. Fury, black and ugly, coursed through every vein. ‘How dare you make a spectacle of me.’ She flung the front door open and stomped through the entrance. ‘How dare you mock me and treat me so terribly.’
It felt incongruous to have undertaken a momentous event—marriage—only to then step over the threshold of her childhood home. The house breathed with familiar freshness and warmth. Tempting tendrils of the scent of bacon, bread, coffee, and tea curled in the air in the entrance. She paused before the mirror. Curse him—a pin had loosened, and a thick lock of hair bulged on one side. She would not sit at her wedding breakfast with her hair such a fright. Of all her dreams, this one she would salvage. Where were her brushes, her combs? Rosanna scanned the line of trunks and cases that filled the hallway, then crouched and slid the leather strap from a buckle.
‘What’s all this?’ Phineas flicked his fingers, then turned to glower at her. ‘Three cases, four trunks… And what is in all these boxes?’
‘My things,’ she replied. ‘You can send over one of your staff to collect them while we are at breakfast.’
‘You can bring one case.’ He raised a finger in demonstration. ‘Anything more is superfluous.’
Rosanna raised herself to standing. ‘I am not repacking.’
‘This isn’t a pleasure jaunt, and it is in no way permanent. You don’t need all of this. If you forget anything, you can just walk over and get it.’
She stamped her foot. ‘I do need them, and I will have them, and you will not presume to tell me otherwise!’
A racket of voices and little feet banged up the front stairs, and a noisy stream of her smaller siblings filled the entrance. Nova and Amadeus skipped inside with barely a glance at them, while Ottile, always in a world of her own creation, danced over the tiles as she sang a song about pikelets and scattered petals over the floor. Frozen with an icy resolve, Phineas’s hard stare did not shift.
Beatrice paused in the doorway. Elliot and Johannes stopped behind her. All of them stared, mouths slightly agape.
Phineas took two steady steps, not once breaking eye contact until he stood before her. The edges of his mouth set firm, and his nostrils flared.
From his light brown hair, parted to the side, to his simple black suit and smooth chin, Phineas Babbage was the most mundane of men. Even his eyes were a grey the same shade as a slate roof. Despite his ordinariness, she recognised a callousness in him, like the man who’d struck her in the park had displayed. And with a tumble of realisation, she understood his speed and his insistence.
Her new husband wasn’t a counter to those men.
He was like them.
And he understood them in a way that, perhaps, she didn’t.
‘I’m going home,’ he said flatly.
Her brothers and sister, still in the doorway, stepped aside to flank his exit. Phineas walked between them, nodding once as he passed her father. Silence fell.
‘Rosie.’ Her father spoke gently but firmly. ‘You have to go with him.’
Chapter Seven
As the crow would fly… Well, a crow wouldn’t bother to fly, it would merely hop the short distance from the door of the Hempel household to his own. Stamping down the stairs, walking past the bay window full of Hempel faces pressed to the glass, up the stairs and sliding the key in the lock before barging into his home like some criminal—he’d not exactly covered a momentous distance. It did not even take a minute.
It felt like a million miles.
He’d known Hempel had a temper. Had opinions and preferences. What surprised him was that they inched their way under his skin and turned like corkscrews, niggling him to irritation, when nothing and no one ever got to him.
Phineas stepped into the replicated entrance of his own home. He wanted to slam the door shut; he wanted to shout into the street,Well, fucking die then. Instead, he crossed the room and placed his hat on the entrance table.
As he shrugged off his coat, Rosanna trounced in. ‘You don’t have to be a shrew,’ he spat.
She drew an indignant breath. ‘I’m not a shrew. I’m a woman. A young woman in a demanding city that has certain expectations of how I look and present myself. And if you expect me to help you—’
‘I am helpingyou—’
‘You can make me more amenable by fetching my things so that I can dress and groom myself in the way that suits me!’
Phineas slung his coat on the hook as his irritation grew. His chest tightened with each breath, and although he tried to expel each gulp of air between pressed lips, his ire wouldn’t settle. ‘I’m so sorry to inform you,milady, but the world no longer gives a fig what you look like. You think they’re going to put you in the society pages? Mrs Babbage, wife of the unknown bank clerk, stuck a feather in her cap today. Or better again, how is this—recently married, she wore her second-best dress for her burial. Shame they couldn’t have a viewing, because after they hauled her body from the Thames, she was such a goddamn mess—’
‘Stop it!’ Her entire body went rigid with her shrill screech. She tugged at the finger on each glove, huffing as she did so. ‘I am still myself. I am still a woman who likes to change her morning dress.’ She slapped her gloves into her palm. ‘You may be planning to leave, but I will need to carry on after all this. And I would like some consistency between who I was and the person I will need to become.’ She untied her bonnet and pulled it from her head. Then she paused, her arms stretched mid-air as she scanned the walls. She turned to him, fury and confusion in her eyes.
He only had one hook. He’d never had need for two.
