The woman in the cell was growing agitated, flinging her arms about and fluffing up within her rags like an outraged chicken. “Maybe if your eyes hadn’t been pointed in the direction of my bosom, you would have dodged in time!”
The smaller man looked uneasily at Spencer. “No harm in looking.” He attempted a sickly chuckle, which died in his throat when Spencer did not echo him.
Christ. Jesus bloody bollocking Christ. This was not his responsibility. He did not know this woman. He didn’t owe her anything.
“No one’s come for her?” he asked.
“Not until you.”
There was no one else. He looked around at the dank walls, oozing moisture from the frigid rain outside. He glanced again through the bars at the woman’s rags, at the mud and shit and whatever other horrors coated her face and hair.
Whatever she had done, she did not deserve this. He could get her out, take her back to her home, and question her there.
The woman had started at the unfamiliar sound of his voice; he suspected she could not see him well from inside the dark cell.
“Pritchard,” she said, “who is that?”
This was probably a terrible idea. Henry suspected she was a confidence woman, and Henry was the most sensible person Spencer knew. The rational thing would be to leave her here: let her solve her own problems and rescue her own damned sheep.
But as much as he tried, Spencer couldn’t always make himself do the rational thing.
“How much?” he asked Pritchard.
The jailer, who’d just opened his mouth to answer Mrs. Halifax’s query, hesitated, looking back and forth between them. His gaze landed upon Spencer, and the fact that he ignored Mrs. Halifax utterly only strengthened Spencer’s sudden, demented resolve.
“How much for what?”
“To have her out of here. To make the charges against her go away.”
“What the devil—” began Mrs. Halifax.
Avarice did not improve the jailer’s face. He named an eye-popping sum, and Spencer did not hesitate to count out the coins.
Within the cell, Mrs. Halifax had gone quiet. The only sound was the clinking of coins, then the groan and shriek of metal as Pritchard pulled open the door.
She emerged, blinking, into the dim light outside the cell. When she caught sight of Spencer, she stopped short, her head going back to look up into his face.
She was of average height for a woman, which meant he still topped her by eight inches or so. She wore several layers of clothing—all of it as thickly coated in muck as her face and hair—and had a thin blanket knotted around her neck like a cloak. Christ, was that all they’d given her to stay warm overnight?
The thought disturbed him, and he took a sharp breath through his nose.
He regretted that instantly, and tried not to be too obvious as he eased back away from her.
“Who are you?” she murmured under her breath as they made for the exit. “What’s your business with me?”
He fixed his gaze on her face, trying to make out her expression beneath the grime. “My name,” he said softly, so that the jailer would not hear, “is Spencer Halifax. And I’ve come to ask a few questions of my wife.”
Chapter 2
Winnie considered with some bemusement the possibility that she was hallucinating.
Even as she considered it, she rejected the notion. If she had grown malnourished and fevered in the ghastly jail cell, she would have fantasized something logical. A bout of drunkenness for Pritchard in which he succumbed to unconsciousness and dropped the keys within her reach, perhaps. Maybe Turner Green’s timely death from sheer moral decrepitude and the resulting dismissal of the charges against her.
She would not have hallucinated a husband.
Therewasno Spencer Halifax. She had made him up whole cloth. And for heaven’s sake, if she had occasionally invented a picture in her mind of her imaginary London husband, he certainly hadn’t looked likethat.
When she’d come stumbling out of the dark cell, even the dim light of the hall had dazzled her eyes. And then the man had dazzled her further.
