Page 26 of To Tame the Wild Rake
Then, too, she had the dull throb in her temples and the aching drag in her lower torso that hinted at a few uncomfortable days with Eve’s curse. Her courses had been irregular and painful ever since the infection that followed the incident. Her body seemed to have the knack of letting her down at the worst possible time.
Honesty compelled her to admit, though, that Sarah’s situation bothered her most.
“Can I help?” Aldridge asked.
Charlotte looked up at him, startled out of her own morose thoughts. “I beg your pardon?”
“You are unhappy about something,” he said. “Can I help? Whatever you need. Even if it is just someone to listen.”
Charlotte shook her head. “Just a touch of the headache,” she told him. The rest was none of his concern.
Aldridge wouldn’t leave it there. “I wondered if something was wrong with Sarah. I have not seen her this evening.”
“There is nothing wrong,” Charlotte insisted. “In fact, it is very right. Sarah and Uncle James went to spend the evening with Bentham and his family. You may have realised that Bentham is courting Sarah?”
It was too fast. Just two days ago, Sarah was promising to take her time. Then came the outing yesterday. Even Charlotte had to admit Bentham showed to advantage with his half-sisters. They went out together this afternoon, too, just Sarah and Bentham, and came back smelling of April and May ready to plot with Uncle James to announce their marriage.
Even without their marriage lines. Even without the witness Wakefield and his agents were seeking alongside the more urgent work of stopping the attacks on any Winshire or Haverford initiative to help those in the slums.
Something in the shift of Aldridge’s eyebrows suggested he knew more than he should. “I suppose you know they are old friends,” she guessed.
“That summer, you told me Sarah had a sweetheart,” he pointed out. “I guessed the rest.”
She remembered, now he mentioned it. Had that been how her brother Elfingham had found out? But she didn’t tell even her glamorous new friend when Sarah eloped. Besides, even as she looked at Aldridge in alarm, Charlotte knew he would never have broken his word to keep their secrets.
Again, he demonstrated his uncanny ability to read her mind. “I was not easy in my mind about my promise to you, so I made a point of meeting the boy, and asking about him. He was a good person then, Charlotte. He planned to speak to your father, to seek for Sarah’s hand.” Aldridge shrugged. “I can’t imagine that went well.”
Charlotte shuddered. “Not well at all. He ran away with Sarah in part to save her from the husband my father and grandfather had chosen. But that was then, Aldridge. He has changed.”
“Not in the essentials, I think. I believe him to be a man of honour, and I saw him with young Tony. I know he has compassion.”
“You are right,” Charlotte agreed. “And that is why all is happening as it should.” Elias would have a father; Sarah a husband. And Charlotte would be alone. She set her jaw and firmed her resolution. She would not be so selfish as to let Sarah know that she was feeling abandoned. Again.
As lonely and as lost when her twin turned away from her now as in that long-ago summer when Aldridge had become her friend. Her only friend, it seemed, at the time, though now the same feeling came pounding back, she was adult enough to know it for maudlin self-pity.
She would dance at the end-of-season ball that Uncle James was already talking about giving to announce that Sarah was, in truth, Bentham’s wife, and had been so for seven years. She would wave them off to their new lives together with a smile on her lips.
She changed the subject to the attacks in the slums, and Aldridge obligingly followed her conversational lead. The topic carried them through the rest of the waltz and on into supper, helping Charlotte to keep her headache at bay and distracting her from her mournful reaction to her sister’s happiness.
Indeed, if she could just manage to get past the uncomfortable quiver she felt whenever Aldridge was near, they could be company to one another in these interminable social events, which he hated as much as she did.
I can do it. No. I can’t.Spending time with Aldridge hurt too much. It made her yearn for the dreams she had put away after the incident.
12
The Beast, her brother Stanley, had run mad. He was calling in favours all through the slums: expending credit that had taken him a decade to build. Revenge, he said, but Elspeth could not see the point.
Certainly, she had not objected to the fire at the Ashford Clinic. She could not deny her satisfaction in doing an ill turn to that cold foreign bitch who had married her brother-in-law, the Earl of Ashford in her deceased husband’s shoes. But Stanley hadn’t stopped there. He’d stirred up brothel-keepers, kid kens, upright-men, arch-rogues, night-walkers, and dimber-dambers. He’d convinced them all they were under attack, that the charitable ventures of the Haverford and Winshire ladies threatened their livelihoods.
Yes, it was true it hurt to lose a kinchin-cove here, a whore there. But there were always more where those came from. The pain would be a lot greater if the Haverford and Winshire families turned their formidable resources to cleaning out the slums.
Oh, they wouldn’t succeed, or not for long. Others would rise where the criminal kings and queens had fallen. As long as people were willing to pay for sex, for power; to scramble over one another for more and better, crime would be there to serve them.
But the current hierarchy was doomed to fall, and she was not going down with them.
Elspeth had been brooding ever since Stanley kidnapped the protégé of a duke’s niece. She needed to decide the best time, the most effective way, to change sides. But his latest start made her defection a matter of some urgency. Not only did she need to get out before the wrath fell upon them, but the information she was taking with her could be enough for her to bargain her way out of the hangman’s noose.
When Kit, her current lover, returned with the news that Stanley had retired to the wing where he kept his boys, she handed him the bag she had packed and led the way downstairs. At this time of the morning, few of the staff were about, and none high enough in her brother’s esteem to risk disturbing him at his play.
