Page 85 of Unforeseen Affairs
“Oh?” An unseen hand gripped her heart and tightened around it.
“Yes,” he murmured, a wider smile breaking out across those wonderful lips. “Only for her would I allow such a degenerate as Mr. Bass to occupy so much of my mind. And there are so many other things I would do only for her, if only she would allow it.”
Something stung at her eyes. With a flutter of uncertainty, Charlotte reached into her small reticule and fished out her handkerchief, then turned away so he might not see as she dabbed it lightly at one corner of her eye. It seemed that giving her affection to another had come with a bevy of unconsidered consequences; mawkishness, Charlotte decided, was the worst of them.
“But although I am only too pleased to help you, I cannot help but feel sad at the demise of that friendship,” Colin sighedbehind her. “The loss of someone from before… well. From when I was young. It feels… almost as if I’ve lost a piece of myself in the process.”
He paused.
Charlotte turned back to him. She wanted to reach out, to touch his cheek or pull him into an embrace. The urge came upon her so suddenly she found it almost alarming.
“We came up as midshipmen together, you know. Like brothers we were.”
Like the brother he’d lost.
She was struck by a pang of hurt, recalling Mrs. Gearing’s stricken face at that first spirit circle. It seemed so long ago, but now the memory pained her in a way she’d never have expected.
The stream of pedestrians that had split around the two of them on the pavement now began to close in, jostling them as they crowded about in their rush home for supper or toward their evening work. But still Charlotte and Colin stood there, close before but somehow closer now, unbothered by the churn of Mancunians bustling around them.
Charlotte extended her hand to Colin.
His face flushed slightly as he regarded it. He took it, then looked away as if it were too much to bear.
For the slightest moment she felt her heart might crack, that she’d presumed too much. But then he tightened his grip on her, squeezing her hand as if holding on for dear life. Perhaps this was what ought to be, what Mrs. Stone had seen when the three of them were in the back room of The Black Candle. Perhaps, as unexpected and unlikely a romance between them was, perhaps it just might—
All at once, an unsettling feeling washed over her. The hair on the back of her neck stood up.
“What?” Colin tugged her closer, concern evident in his voice. “What is it?”
“I don’t know. Something… ominous.” She looked back up to the banner advertising Mr. Bass’s show. “I can’t quite place it.”
She looked back to Colin, who stared at her, eyes wide. As if this time she’d truly seen a ghost and he truly believed the tale.
“Hush,” he soothed, drawing her against his side in a quiet, dignified way. As a husband might do with a wife. “We’re tired and draggle-tailed. Everything will seem sunnier once we’ve tidied up.”
Charlotte accepted his affection and platitudes. Still, she could not help but scan the crowd with trepidation, sensing a very ill omen indeed.
Seeing nothing she could recognize as alarming, she was about to lean into Colin and allow him to lead her to their hotel, when suddenly her breath caught.
A sour-faced, sinister-looking man, standing just outside the channel of pedestrians working their way up and down the street, glared straight at them. It took Charlotte a moment, but she recognized him.
“Mr. Trenwith,” she breathed, as one might hiss a curse.
“What?”
She glanced at Colin, who appeared confused.
“Mr. Trenwith, the assistant—Mr. Bass’s assistant! He’s—”
But when she turned back, the man had disappeared.
“His assistant?”
She could hear the frown in his voice as she turned her head this way and that, trying to locate the short, ill-tempered soul whom Mr. Bass had blamed for his own deception at Mrs. Kitson’s spirit circle. But he had disappeared into the crowd, through some trickery of his own.
“Former assistant,” she clarified.
“What in the blazes could he want? And why would he be here in Manchester, outside this theater? Has Mr. Bass recanted, and chosen to retain his services, do you think?”
